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.

Time & Space & Music

This blog's gonna ramble a bit...

Time's been on my mind today. Not enough time to get everything done before we leave for Brevard. Not enough time to completely prepare for recreating the Tai Chi Trees in Alcina. Oh - and there's still bits of Act 2 of Traviata I don't quite know (I guess I'm confessing the same thing as Maestro Slatkin, except he was in the midst of Met performances...)

Not enough time to take some time off; so many of us feel this way nowadays.

So I thought I'd take the time to blog about TIME.

Time expands, slows down, and speeds up when music is present - either being made or being listened to. We've all experienced this phenomenon, some more than others. I've known for quite some time (pardon that one), that my sense of time was a bit, um, different. At first I was made to feel that my sense of time was extraordinary (my mom wouldn't set the oven timer for cookies, I could just call them done at 9 or 10 or 11 minutes - whatever the recipe called for.) I had a crazy sense of time, almost Vulcan.

Later while I was in college, I was made to feel that my sense of time was deficient. You see, I couldn't keep a steady beat. At all. Really!

I had terrible experiences with others - particularly other students - who made it a point to point this out. I started to feel a bit incompetent, and then I started to think something was wrong. I realized that other musicians noticed if music was moving forward - they called this "rushing". They also noticed if the beat wasn't steady - I called it "being expressive." Sometimes they made faces when this happened, as if it was either hurting them, or something was smelling kinda bad. I usually perked up because something was happening of interest...

The metronome - an instrument that has nothing to do with music making - clicks inhumanly at regular intervals to make audible the illusion that there is a beat somewhere in time. For years I tried to practice with it, tried to understand how it simply wasn't representing the time that I felt inherent in the phrases of music I was playing. I swore the metronome was dragging or rushing through piece after piece. It didn't matter if it was Bach or Ravel or Mozart or Copland. Time clicked differently in me and in my music.

Now of course, with my 47 yrs of life giving me a bit more insight, it's clear as day that frankly my sense of time is vastly superior to those others out there making music who try to follow the illusion of time, ictus, and especially tempo. Okay, superior sounds a bit - well - superior. Sorry.

Maybe "more evolved" would be a better way of saying it? Except that I think what's gone on in music lately is a devolution of time -- into a non-human, robotic sense of time clicking in even beats that neither speed up or slow down. Perhaps it's the GarageBand software, or the clicktracks on Broadway, or the computerization of music making via Sibelius or Finale. Once a composer puts something on the computer, and it's 4 minutes and 31 seconds long, it ALWAYS is 4 minutes and 31 seconds long (until a human plays it live and messes it up!)

However, Music is Art; and time flows in Art differently than in life. Isn't that part of what draws us to Art? The ebb and flow of time is unique to each great piece of art I've ever worked on - from Chopin's 2nd ballade to Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.

Art certainly needs its Apollonian construct and structure to exist. It’s the vessel that art lives in – like Time sitting in Space. Art exists at the intersection where things vibrate – the vibration of creativity, the vibration of the string or the voice, the vibration of the emotional energy of an actor, the vibration of light & color on the stage, etc. Vibrations are key to understanding Time and Space and I think this connection to music and music making is vital and needs to be explored.

Time opens up whenever Music happens. Another way to open time (or better yet, allow it to flow freely), one needs to allow for divergent thinking to create possibilities (i.e. works of art) to explore all those great questions posed by composers, scores, libretti, collaborations, singers, pianists, conductors, etc.

Exploration takes time, but leads to Discovery and New Lands and New Horizons. Yet, it is such a vast missing component in today's world of google-the-answer-now and tell-me-how-it's-supposed-to-go.

Take the time to simply explore, next time you've got the chance to make some music or learn some music or listen to music or look at a sculpture.

And throw that metronome away!