9. Music-Mind: Music Making on the Right Side of the Brain
Less Manipulating, More Manifesting (…and a book club)
This post will be both a short exploration of right- and left-brain processes, as well as a sort of ‘One-Woman Book Club’ with recommendations (alongside non-recommendations).
Desperately Seeking Certainty
During the worst stages of my hand and arm injuries, a rehabilitative piano teacher I was working with suggested reading and working through the method “Greifen und Begreifen” (grasping and understanding).
This was a collection of letters sent by the Swiss pianist and pedagogue Anna Hirzel-Langenhan to her students during the Second-World War. Because of war restrictions, her students couldn’t travel to her, so she created some exercises to assist them in developing an “Anschlagskultur” (a culture of touch), intensifying the connection and responsive interaction between the fingers and the piano keys.
There were some pretty controversial exercises in there involving grasping (greifen) of the keys which particularly appealed to me because I was, at that time, in an ardent search for certainty.
Grasping the keys was the pianistic equivalent to an emotional security blanket. I remember at that point a strong need for a clear and methodical path through a web of injuries which were seriously overwhelming and threatening to bring down the entire edifice of not only my professional life, but also my sense of identity.
Under normal circumstances, this method book should be harmless, even helpful. But, dealing with things like a diminished ability to sense the finger tips and a loss of fine-motor control, when encouraged to grasp, I GRASPED!!
And even a minuscule extra load to my already over-burdened playing system was just too much.
It made things worse.
(The picture is not me… I kind of wish it was… )
During this phase of extreme destabilization, I remember looking everywhere for clarity and conciseness, recipes and recommendations, ways to reduce the sense of overwhelming complexity and entanglement of the problems I was encountering. I asked a psychotherapist (in a moment of frustration): “Couldn’t you just recommend a book for me to work through so that I that could just solve these problems?” She slowly nodded her head, a non-verbal but unmistakeable: “No”. A book can’t do the work for you in manifesting a sense of your place in the world. Nor can a teacher or psychotherapist. I get it.
I would, however, like to share books that have been essential guide posts along my journey and hope they are illuminating for you as well.
The Master and his Emissary
I’ve been reading this masterful book by the philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, which offers a fresh perspective on our brain’s two hemispheres and the cultural impacts of an over-reliance on left-hemisphere processes and propensities.
We tend to think of the brain’s hemispheric functions as:
Left:
speech (and therefore communication, and therefore… THINKING!)
analysis ( giving us all the good things society values most: MATH and SCIENCE)
Right:
artsy-fartsy things like intuition, poetry, dancing, music-making, smiles, rainbows, and unicorns (with a little glitter thrown in).
McGilchrist makes a case against a "left-hemisphere chauvinism", asserting that it's actually the right hemisphere that provides one with a vision (or hint of a vision) of a comprehensive and holistic world. The right brain tends to engage directly with experience, not relying merely on theories and reductions. The right hemisphere has the potential to oversee the entirety of a situation, with a broader sense of awareness than the left hemisphere, which tends to focus narrowly on specific details, building up reality piece-by-piece, as if it were building a world comprised only of lego blocks. In a world that prioritizes left hemisphere processes, McGilchrist (without wanting the disregard any of the profound contributions of the left hemisphere including speech, analytical thinking, and a baby’s adorable way of picking up Cheerios) argues for a balance between the hemispheres that recognizes the right hemisphere’s role as that of the master: initiating processes, synthesizing inputs; and the left hemisphere as the emissary: feeding the right brain with much-needed information and analyzing/structuring data.
In other words, the right hemisphere is a BOSS.
Grasping, Grabbing, Getting
a left-brain / right-hand plot to command the universe
The neural location of grasp is in the left hemisphere of the brain, close to the speech areas (for most people). While speech and hand gestures are often neurologically linked, the specific gestures related to grasping are even more intrinsically entangled within the speech areas of the left-hemisphere.
It’s interesting to think of how often the act of grasping is intertwined linguistically with the act of comprehending (in many languages). If you want to say that you’ve acquired something mental, you say that you’ve grasped it. These things tend to be exemplary left-brain processes.
Here are some more hand idioms:
Get a hold on it
Get out of hand
Point something out
Get to the point
Prove a point
Within one’s grasp
Grab the opportunity
Grasp at straws
Grab the bull by its horns
“The idea of ‘grasping’ implies seizing a thing for ourselves, for use, wresting it away from its context, holding it fast, focussing on it. The grasp we have, our understanding in this sense, is the expression of our will, and it is a means to power. It enables us to ‘manipulate’ – literally to take a handful of whatever we need – and thereby dominate the world around us. ”
Goethe’s Faust, a character that has imprinted the German psyche like no other, must obtain all of the knowledge of the world by grabbing hold of a damning bargain with the devil (‘Faust’ means ‘Fist’ in German). But even Faust knows that there is more to Art than acquired knowledge:
FAUST: “You can’t [know the art of reciting], if you can’t feel it, if it never r
ises from the soul, and sways t
he heart of every single hearer, w
ith deepest power, in simple ways.
You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, c
ooking up a stew from other’s scraps, b
lowing on a miserable fire, m
ade from your heap of dying ash. L
et apes and children praise your art, i
f their admiration’s to your taste, b
ut you’ll never speak from heart to heart, u
nless it rises up from your heart’s space.”
Goethe is alluding to the idea of a ‘manifestation’ or a ‘bringing into being’ of something mysterious, something that is apparently enabled by right-hemisphere processes.
McGilchrist writes:
“The Artist didn’t merely reflect what was there anyway, albeit it in a novel way’, but actually ‘brought into being’ a truth about the world that was not there before.”
We allow something to emerge rather than building it up piecemeal and analyzing it to death. We make space for subconscious processes that quietly and subtly guide us where we need to go. We can, of course, enjoy guidance from others (teachers, colleagues), but this doesn’t replace an internal dialog with that intangible something, which is often not accessible through words.
McGilchrist again:
“We cannot attain an understanding by grasping it for ourselves. It has already to be in us, and the task is to awaken it, or perhaps to unfold it - to bring it into being within us. Similarly we can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it. We cannot give them our understanding, only awaken their own, latent, understanding. This is also the meaning of the dark saying that ideas come to us, not we to them. Our role in understanding is that of an open, in one sense active, passivity.“
Said in other words by the great Jazz pianist, Keith Jarrett: “We’re trying to find this place that we don’t hear many people coming from. We don’t hear people swinging that often, if I can speak for Gary [Peacock] (and maybe Jack [Dejohnette], too). What young players know about the music is so stilted somehow. They do their best, and they might be great players, but there’s a lot of wasted energy going on.”
Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, underlines the widespread pedagogical insistence on left-brain capabilities, even with regard to drawing and art making:
“I will go out on a limb and say that we mistakenly may have been putting all our educational eggs into one basket only, while shortchanging other truly valuable capabilities of the human brain, namely perception, intuition, imagination, and creativity. Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
She developed a series of exercises to stimulate right-brain processes during drawing, which are highly recommended. In essence, she devised ways to distract or inhibit the interfering, reductionistic, and analytical left brain that tries to approach drawing as if it were merely the act of collecting various features. The left-brain draws by grasping onto certain pre-set concepts of “eyes”, “nose”, “mouth” and compiles them into a picture, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. The right-brain, in contrast, guides the hand by (subconsciously and non-linguistically) exploring shadings, lines, tones, temperatures, wholes. When the identifying and grasping brain (left) is inhibited, the perceiving and manifesting (right) brain is free to work its magic.
left vs right brain drawings
There is also similar language in the classic tennis manual “The Inner Game of Tennis” by W. Timothy Gallway, which really is required reading (!) for all musicians.
Gallway identifies two selves, Self 1 and Self 2.
Self 1 is conscious, deliberate, good at linear, analytical and verbal problem solving (sound familiar left-brain?). Self 1 can sometimes be a jerk, putting Self 2 down through some harsh Self-to-Self-talk. Self 2 is subconscious and excels at non-verbal processes, imagery, and sensory integration. Gallway encourages training Self 1 to calm the f*#k down, like Edwards does above in drawing processes.
“Perhaps a better way to describe the player who is ‚unconscious‘ is by saying that his mind is so concentrated, so focused, that it is still....When the player is in this state of concentration, he is really into the game, he is at one with the racket, ball, and stroke; he discovers his true potential.”
The last book I’ll mention here is the greatest piano-technique method book of all time: Zen and the Art of Archery, by the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel. This book explores the non-doing, purposeless, and receptive aspects of finding Zen truths embedded in any given activity, which for Herrigel happened to be archery.
“‘The right Art is purposeless. Aimless!’ said the master, and explained further: ‘The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.’”
Two approaches
I was thinking about two ways of music-making that might exemplify the left- vs right-hemisphere approaches, and thought of …
George vs. Leonard
Conductor George Szell was a stickler. His attention to detail was legendary, and feared. Singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his memoir drew attention to: “...Szell’s nervous obsession with speed, which usually led to time-consuming rehearsals, his compulsive need always to have an opinion different from others’, and his considerable paranoia when it came to the orchestra’s ill-will”. For Szell, music seemed to be a collection of exquisitely crafted particles, and this atomistic approach (along with some plain old meanness) created a legacy of dissatisfaction and dissent among his players.
Leonard Bernstein had a different approach that stressed the whole, the spiritual, the connectivity and the relatedness. Violinist Jennie Shames wrote:
“For me the greatest thing about a conductor is how he paces a piece so that it creates a sense of inevitability in how it unfolds. Nobody did that greater than Leonard Bernstein. At that moment, it was the only way you could possibly imagine the piece to be. …. For all of us that worked with him, when I ask any one of them who is the greatest conductor you ever played with, without skipping a beat we all say Leonard Bernstein. That doesn’t always mean he’s the one we loved as a person the most, or was the easiest to spend time with. He could be sort of difficult. But there was something so commanding, and so all-encompassing about Lenny Bernstein.”
Below are two silent videos of both conductors. The gestural language speaks volumes:
Wrapping up
Grabbing onto, manipulating, over-analyzing, tying down, directing, dissecting, insisting on… this seems like a mis-guided and out of control left brain.
Sensing the material, purposelessly allowing the connections and relations to emerge, trusting one’s subconscious intuition, living the process, manifesting… These kinds of things seem to be permeated by the right-brain.
I leave you, without commentary, with the quote that announces Robert Schumann’s World-Wonder: the Fantasie op. 17, played by myself with drawings from Alexander Glinkin.
“Through all the tones in this colourful earthly dream, a quietly drawn-out tone sounds for the one who listens in secret”