This page is a work in progress sharing some simple personal thoughts about piano playing, art and creativity, and some life. For my convenience more political considerations are grouped together under more political considerations. For some more humorous links look below.

A short review of the Tanakh and the Bible. The Tanakh describes the relationship of a a god and a tribe, about 2500 years ago. The god is not particularly nice: he does not refrain from genocide toward other tribes, and he is often very cruel toward its own, if his laws are not followed. The tribe seems to be mostly concerned with shepparding, rising crops, and figthing other tribes. By the time we reach the end of the book, the god seems to become more tolerant, although he appears to devise and carry over a plan to sacrifice his own son to promote the spread of his cult to larger tribes. (There is quite a disagreement between the Tanakh and the Bible on this). The very last chapters are seemingly a mix of down to earth organizational suggestions, and rather dark apocalyptic visions.
A rather disconcerting book, although it seems to generate a large following. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly given its premises, this often translates in a variety of justifications for intolerance, persecution and wars. Overall rating: baffling.

Memory. Without memory the human experience disintegrates into a void. As impermanent as events and individuals are, their recollection constitues a thread that binds together otherwise disconcertig realities.

Music and Magic. A quatation from the magician Ian Swiss that applies well to music and performance: You cannot cross into the world of magic until you put everything else aside and beside you, including your own desires and needs, and focus on bringing an experience to the audience. This is magic. Nothing else. The artistic event is first and foremost an experience, and the focus has to be on its delivering.

There is a time for everything. Ogni cosa a suo tempo.

What time is this?

It's the time of birds, of long breaths

and breeze carrying tears of rain

Trans-human. Jorge Borges (Otras Inquisiciones) quotes Shelley (In defense of Poetry , 1821) arguing that all individual poems, past, present and future, are actually fragments of a universal infinite poem. Our fundamental unity is reflected in any category of our productions. Poetry, literature, music are not a historical sequence of individuals' contributions but a single manifestation of an inquisitive universal spirit. (The same could be said of science and religion or any activity that involves bringing forward unformed matter or ideas into some reality.) Are we uno or disconnected fragments or both?

Art and Metaphor. Art can be considered as the exploration of the place of metaphor and simile. Art therefore is not? since arguabily reality just is? Or reality just appears to be and what is is the metaphore? (Vaguely inspired by Neil Gaiman Neverwhere).

Lavoro. The italian word for 'to work', lavorare, has the flavour of the daily activity of the prestinaio (the breadmaker). Every day, with the exception of sunday, tu lavori e sudi (you work and sweat). There is something very reassuring about having a daily activity - like working every day at an instrument, like having a table to go back to every morning.

Composition and Science. I had conversations with academic composers actually comparing their activity to that of a scientist that does reasearch. Having been a scientist for long years I generally avoided to make comments. More honestly (and in the privacy of a web page) I think that these ideas are based either on a misuse of words or in a misunderstanding of what the scientific method is. It is a bit of an unfortunate position: while there is no doubt that artists are not doing science, the misunderstanding might trap the methophore maker in a place not so conductive for creativity.

Technical secrets. A quote from Heinrich Neuhaus:

There are no technical secrets to become great pianists.The only way is to work with patience, intelligence and tenacity.

Which might sound too easy, but it is also one of the best encouragements I could find: if we apply our human qualities, greatness, in a human dimension of course, will follow.

Art and Being. Inspired by Martin Heidegger (The Origin of the Work of Art)

Reflection of what art and art making is may be linked with the relation of being and human being. Art, that is beauty in a metaphysical sense, unconceals the truth of being. The apparition of truth in the art work might be related to our own, temporary, unfolding as parts of the universal Being. Our own art making might be related to the truth of our identity, but it is also moved and motivated by the desire for transcending ourselves for the truth of being. Perhaps in its most clear examples it is guided by, or resonates with, it.

Does this make any sense?

 

Art and Necessity. Inspired by Federico Fellini. In a perhaphs humbler way, Art is a necessity. The necessity is to try to make sense of a reality that otherwise, taken at face value, would be monstrous. Art frames reality in a reassuring, familar, more confortable place, a place that is less overwelming then the incomprehensibly colossal size, and apparent blindness, of the materiality sorrounding us. The act of threading some simple beads is an attempt of bringing order and perhaps some form of understanding,

Successful or not it requires consideration and attention: it takes us away from our corporeal reality and leads us in a place of thought, wander and imagination. It is built in us, it seems to be a necessary condition of our being, or simply to make our life more bearable.

Art and Motivation. (Elizabeth Gilbert) Art is a path for the courageous and the faithful. One must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place ... similarly for science? certanly for spiritual quests. Possibly art - science - spirituality share the idea of searching, and the motivation to search cannot be that of success and recognition.

Soft-heartedness. From Zen & Japanese Culture by Daisetz Suzuki (Chapter VIII, Zen and the Art of Tea):

Soft-heartedness is "tender-mindness" or "gentleness of spirit".
Generally we are too egotistic, too full of hard resisting spirit. We are individualistic, unable to accept things as they are or as they come to us. Resistance means friction, friction is the source of all trouble. When there is no self, the heart is soft and offers no resistance to outside influences.

"Things" are both good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. For example, during any kind of performance one does not rejoice for a successfully completed section, nor despair because something has gone wrong. Things unfold in front of us and there is no judgment.

Soft-heartedness and practice. It would appear that somewhat as a corollary of the previous thought,one should consider dividing practice in at least two parts. The first is the usual, analytical part of practice. It involves analyzing and decomposing, taking apart and putting together, training the muscles and tendons involved with the physical aspect of the execution. The second is the training of the clear mind. Here one trains to be an observer, or better a listener, as opposed to an evaluator and a judge. Again, there is no rejoicing nor disappointment. It is interesting that in all these years of learning and instruction very little attention, if any, has been given to this important side of performance. It is quite strange, if one assumes, as I am more and more lead to believe, that this superficially mysterious capacity is all important for an organic performance. (Where by organic I mean in-one-piece, such as an organism under the guidance of its autonomic nervous system.)

A four steps recipe, with all the limitations of a recipe, adapted to piano practice and performance

Show up

Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention
Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention
Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention
Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention
Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention Pay Attention

Don't be attached to the outcome

Share your work

Beauty. Parvathi Naryan (a nine year old student of my friend Amy Billheimer)

Sometimes playing is very difficult but if you keep trying it sounds very pretty

Is this not a complement to the Neuhaus quote at the beginning of this page? From a young child: keep try and it will sound pretty. We all can, it is built within.

Meaning in Music. The good thing about doing and thinking about art is that it forces to think about life. For months I have been struggling with the problem of meaning: what do I try to say in the pieces I compose. Do I have something to say? Perhaps not. Kurt Vonnegut, in an interesting section of A man Without a Country discusses stories that oscillate the narrative between well defined good and ill fortune and stories that don't. Cinderella in the first category. Good fortune is well defined: seemingly out of reach for Cinderella it is nonetheless the goal of the tale and it is eventually accomplished forever thereafter. Hamlet is in this second category, and the idea is that in real life often is very hard to define good or il fortune: "But there is a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it's that Shakespeare told us the truth ... The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and the bad news is." Telling the truth is very hard in a tale of good and bad fortune, and it is so easy to slip and make it a shallow fairy tale. What this has to do with meaning in music? We know so little, maybe more then spelling out meaning we can only show and ask questions, and instrumental music might be a medium that has built in such indeterminacy.

More Political Considerations

Anger. For years, and especially during the recent turn of our policies to the right, I spent a lot of time being angry. Angry at the president, at the administration, at the lies, at what I perceive as a loss of our values as a civil society. For a while I was so angry that I could not listen to the news: I was certain that I would find more reasons to feed my anger. After a while I decided to try to stop, feeling that my anger served no purpose other than possibly shorten my life, I am, after all, reaching an age at which it is better to keep one's blood pressure down.
And then I found this:

Why should I give them my mind as well? -Dalai Lama,
when asked if he wasn't angry at the Chinese for taking over his country.

that colored the whole episode as a possible beginning of a spiritual quest, or more simply the beginning of an understanding of how our mind works.

More on the mind. What is most illuminating about the citation above is not so much that t appears as a very good attitude, to use such an abused word. What is most interesting it that it brings home the idea that the mind might be an object that is not necessarily "ours". It has a life of it own, and it can be occupied and infected very easily.

Literature and Tolerance. Northrop Frye

Literature encourages tolerance - bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

Reality driven by fantasy. It is so strange that in just a few years, staring around 2001, it is now 2006, discussions about the legality of torture have become common place. Leaving aside the sadness and repulsion generated by this state of affairs, it is interesting to notice how parts of the debate offers an insight into a fundamental human capacity. One of the main arguments in favor of torture is the "finger on the trigger" scenario: "would you torture a person if you knew that she knew where a terrorist attack would take place in the next 24 hours". The gut-feeling reaction to such question is that "of course, yes, we would, we should do so to save innocent lives", and there is the strength of the argument. (Apparently there is even a TV show depicting such scenarios, I think that it is called 24 hours). What is interesting, again leaving sadness to the side, is to see the impact that such a fantasy can have on reality. While proponents of the argument seem to be unable to produce a single real example of the scenario, torture is now very real for thousands of people under the control of a variety of USA military and secret services branches. This is a, very dark, reminder of the power of our imagination in shaping reality.

Now we torture and are proud of it (2006). Just a few months after I wrote the previous note. The President and Vice-President can go on TV and say that there is nothing wrong with applying torture to prisoners. They still do not use the word "torture" but claim that practices defined by inernational law as torture are not so, and can and should be used. The usual verbal trickery does not matter much: the slippery road away from a civilized society is getting steeper. One wanders what next?

More torture. Fast forward a year and few months and you have Judiciary committee hearings where the future Attorney General refuses to call water boarding torture. One of the leading democrats in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, gives him her vote thus guaranteeing his confirmation. It looks like the barbarians have entered the city and are comfortably established in the pretty houses off the main streets.

Semi-Serious Links

Intelligent Design (so to speak!). Get up to date with the latest ideas on evolutionary theory.