Credo: My He(art) Is Not A Clock

Sense8 blog #2
There's a lovely moment in Season One of Netflix's "Sense8". It takes place in the Anahuacalli Museum south of Mexico City. The museum was the brain child of Diego Rivera, the amazing artist who also happened to be Frida Kahlo's husband.

In the episode, Lito - a closeted Mexican gay action-hero celebrity - is mourning the breakup with his boyfriend, Hernando.  During multiple flashbacks, we overhear the two men talking about love and art:
Hernando reminds Lito of a line from one of his movies: "My heart is not a clock." Lito remembers that his character was always late prompting Hernando to say how much he loved that line because it was both "an apology that is also an anthem."

Later, Hernando (speaking in front of a Diego mural) says to Lito, "Love is not something we wind up, something we set or control. Love is just like art. A force that comes into our lives without any rules, expectations or limitations, and every time I hear that line, I am reminded that love, like art, must always be free."

At the heart of art, there is no mechanism. Love and Art share this. To create an algorithm for love would be impossible - although many are currently trying. To create the same for art would totally screw it up. Deep down, we know that our hearts are not clocks. Often, love comes to us at the wrong time in our lives. My wife and I fell in love when we were in college, but we were not ready to marry. That happened seven years later after much angst and passion. Love finds people who aren't ready for it. People go looking for love and can't find it. Love is a mystery.

I find that Love, actually, just happens.

Talk to any musician or actor and they'll try to articulate this idea of "happening". Being "musical" is something that can't be taught, it just happens. Being "in the moment" is something that acting teachers try to work on with their students, oftentimes through various methods - which are just other forms of clocks and mechanisms really - in order to let things happen organically. Musicians recreate scores written in black dots on white pages, interpreting tempo markings and other notions (like "Allegro" or "Very slow" or "half-note = 76") which are also simply different ways of saying "time moves like this". Again, another clock.

But Music is not a clock. It is not something one winds up, or something that can be set to control its elemental pieces. Music is a force that enters into our lives without any rules, limitations, or expectations. Music, like love, must always be free.

Of our many anxieties, Musicians truly fear the notion of dragging or rushing. It is a deeply ingrained idea that music has a "tempo" and that that "tempo" must be decided upon and kept. This comes from the silly - and terribly amateurish idea - that music moves through its bars in equal time. So equal, one can set a clock to it. We call this clock a METRONOME. It was, perhaps, the worst thing ever invented where music's concerned.

You see, all music flows forward at various speeds. Listen to any great pianist and you will find that you can't find a metronomic marking that holds past a few bars or so, even though there's no "marking" from the composer that says "speed up a bit here" or "drag a bit here." Music is not metronomic. Humans are not metronomes. Our heart rates move up and down all the time. See a person you're angry with and what happens? See your cat getting ready to jump into your aunt-who-hates-cats lap and what happens? Voices are human things and so each one will vibrate differently, causing the shifts in vibrato and breath that should change how fast or slow one aria gets sung by various singers.

Debussy said it best: "You know what I think about metronome marks? They're right for a single bar, like 'roses with a morning life'. Only there are those who don't hear music and who take these marks as authority to hear it still less!"

Debussy got it, I think. But most musicians are simply scared of tempi. Why? They get yelled at for dragging, or rushing by conductors or their teachers. "Don't Rush!" is something we've all heard more than a few times in our life. Another example of why: during the weeks it takes to put on operas, singers rehearse with a pianist, and then in the last few days they sing with an orchestra. Inevitably they notice that things feel differently and chalk it up to "the tempi are different", or "this conductor changes tempi once he's in front of an orchestra". While this might be true, something else is causing the perception that time is moving differently when one changes from piano to orchestral accompaniment: Pianos are percussive instruments, and many times the rehearsal pianists - if they are young - rush the conductors. Orchestras seldom rush, and most of the instruments playing create sound in a non-percussive manner, changing the time it takes for their sounds to reach the ears of the singers. So parts of an aria or duet might feel too slow, other parts too fast.

We train young conductors and pianists to "keep a tempo". We talk to singers about time like it is fixed somehow. They work to find "their tempo" for this or that aria. Instead, I think singers and pianists should go listen to recordings of great singers and conductors. Quickly one discovers a more organic flow of time, a flexibility, that also appears to change phrase by phrase. The sense of time was more horizontal and less fixed before our current age of anxiety. We fear TIME in music so much that the solution seems to be to set a clock into it's heart in order to control it.

This clock sits at the centre of all mediocre music-making.

That's what happens when we fear something. We set out to control it. (Here's a link to my blog on fear: Fear In Opera)

We created metronomes long ago, but we continue to create invisible ones today. Too many put these clocks into the heart of their art.

My credo? I believe that My Art's Heart Is Not a Clock. I believe it is another kind of force more akin to Love, that lives without limitations and expectations.

Those who want to know what to expect before the Art is created, those who want to put limits on Art, or those who want Art and Artists to have adequately comfortable lives that are safe, shouldn't be leading our world, or our musical worlds. Many are, and that is the really frightening thing.

So toss out your art's clock. Allow love back in. Love that has no bounds, no rules, no walls. You'll find a release and a freedom that is truly exhilarating and, perhaps, transformative.

And spend some time checking out Frida and Diego. They were cool.

March Madness #8: Thirtysomething

March Madness #8: Thirtysomething

Thirtysomething, the television show that aired for 4 seasons and 85 episodes back in the late 80s, brings back such fond memories of my musical education.

What?

Yes. It aired during the last year of my bachelor’s degree and ended the last year of my master’s degree. Basically the four most important years of my musical education studying at Simpson College and the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory of Music getting degrees in piano performance.

I’ve been re-watching it on DVD (not Netflix, but that ol’ fashioned medium) late at night during the last week and it’s been bringing up memories of those late 80s: Where I was, what I was thinking, who I was – or who I thought I was – and who I thought I’d grow up to be.

Yeah, it was about a bunch of literal thirty-something yuppies. Yes, it was a pre-cursor of Friends, that tackled parenthood, marriage, divorce, careers, death, relationships, affairs, by creating a community of friends who sorted through major and minor angst-filled episodes trying to figure out what it meant to be a man or a woman in the new paradigm of the post-Reagan world.

But I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as looking forward into the future I’d never have because I was going to try to become a professional musician. The characters on TV were housewives, advertising executives, a professor, and a photographer who didn’t really know how to create a career. I guess I identified with Melissa (the photographer) because she was “artistic”. I also had a crush on Hope (Michael’s wife). I kinda thought I was like Elliot cause he was also “artistic” and was a mess, literally and emotionally.

I had a love/hate relationship with these characters because I thought how cool it might be to have a “normal” life, but I was so scared I might actually have to become one of them by failing to become a professional musician.  Of course, life throws you curves and I have ended up like one – actually two – of them. I’m a professor (Gary, the man/boy who refused to grow up) and have to admit have actually, clearly turned into Michael, the Jewish angst-filled worrywart par excellence.  Who knew?! (Well, if you could have known my mother, you’d understand why me being a Jewish worrywart is not that much of a stretch…) And I’ve had a few major career changes and personal depressions like Michael went through during the course of the series.

It would have been nice to have been in one place, had friends, had a house, and a solid base while dealing with some of these pains of growing up. Instead, my wife and I traveled all around the country – from New York City to Chicago to Tulsa to Pittsburgh to Memphis to Ithaca to Miami to Montreal plus a bunch of other places in between. We don’t have that community. I regret that, particularly while watching Thirtysomething.

But how does this connect with my musical education?

A few things, first  for me it’s about the culture of social media that didn’t exist twenty-five years ago. Being a student during the late 80s was a time when TV was ancillary to those other mediums of entertainment – bar bands, movies, rented videos, and live concerts and shows. I would spend my early mornings practicing (and in KC, that meant 8am to 10am every morning), then head into classes, then more practicing and/or rehearsing with singers, then studio classes or opera rehearsals, then dinner, then more opera rehearsals or practicing (into the wee hours). Late nights were spent on the phone to NYC with my future wife. I also read the complete works of Shakespeare, assistant edited those opera anthologies, was a research assistant on those musical theatre anthologies, played dozens of vocal recitals, played dozens and dozens of operas, got into Juilliard Opera Center as a coaching fellow, and maintained (barely) a long-distance relationship via nothing but a phone and a voice. We spent thousands of dollars on phone bills…

But every day, I got a lot done. A LOT DONE.

I can’t tell you how different it is now. Everyone having to check email, keeping up with their blog readings, their tweeting friends or FBing statuses, texting continually through classes, rehearsals, lessons, dinners, etc.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or overstating the time and energy involved in today’s social online whirlwind.  It has taken a toll on what we now can’t expect from ourselves, our colleagues, and our students. How is there time to get it all done, learn everything you need to learn, have all the experiences you’d wish for, yada, yada, yada?

Thirtysomething was the only TV show I tried to watch regularly. I remember rescheduling coaching’s and once even calling in sick to an opera rehearsal I was supposed to play in order to catch an episode (once you missed an episode, that was it until it’d go into re-runs in the summer).  I loved the issues that it tackled, how passionate the acting was, how funny it was and how moving it could be. Men cried on the show and that was new for me.

Watching the episodes now makes me pine away for the days when I had the time to practice the Barber piano concerto just for fun. When I thought I’d have decades to work through all the Beethoven sonatas and play every operatic score written in the 20^th century without dropping any notes.

Ah youth!

So I look back and wonder why I thought I had to separate myself from others in order to focus on my career. Why I lost touch with my friends from those years so long ago. Facebook’s not a substitute for actual contact and with every year that does go by, I wish I was back in Dr. Baker’s studio class listening to the Barber sonata or Scriabin etudes getting nervous for my own renditions in front of my peers.

That was my community, plus the singers I worked with and rehearsed with and played recitals with. I’m glad that still exists in today’s world.

Off to meetings and rehearsals and squeaking in thirty minutes on a Chopin Ballade instead of reading email.  Sounds like a good plan!