Inspired Mind Vs. Industrious Mind

Apr 152013
 

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” – Thomas Edison
(source)

From a young age Thomas Edison had a significant hearing loss. Legend says he took advantage of the impairment to isolate himself from social and educational experiences in pursuit of his experiments and speculations. Perhaps he came across as arrogant or unpleasant if he didn’t socialize much, but it’s obvious that his contributions to technology, science, and commerce have been immeasurable in the past few generations. The light bulb and the gramophone have changed our world’s history, and those are just two examples of Edison’s inventions.

I think of the creative person as having two minds–the inspired mind and the industrious mind.

When time is on your hands and you’re looking for the next project to start, turn on the inspired mind. Take in lots of inputs, take long walks, read, listen to music, wonder and speculate. Cast a wide net, open up, and let your right-brain imagination make unexpected connections. One definition of inspiration is when your brain makes odd connections between things that you and other people wouldn’t usually think to connect. Love is like a playground, a politician is a cat sleeping in the sun, and a hopeless heart needs a box of tools and a trip to the grocery store.

The industrious mind is very different. You’re deep in a project, so you need to put your head down and work. You don’t want your mind wandering around in many meandering trails. The industrious mind needs you to create a little world in your work, and to live deeply in that world. You close the door behind you and work. Emotions about your work are very distracting. Thinking about the whys of yourself, your work, and your little created world will disrupt your progress. The industrious mind relies on steady effort and immersion, closing yourself off from the world to get work done.

Sometimes all you need is inspiration. If you’re writing limericks or cute little poems like Ogden Nash wrote, the sixty-second intuitive burst is more likely your approach. I actually don’t know how much time or effort were required for Nash to complete one of his poems, but he wrote hundreds and hundreds of them so basic math says he must have cranked them out pretty quick.

On the other hand, writing a novel requires the industrious, meticulous approach stacking inspiration upon inspiration. As Walter Mosley points out in his book This Year You Write Your Novel, the complexities and innumerable connections in a good novel require hundreds of days to build. A writer cannot hope to hold an entire novel in her head at one time, let alone create the whole thing in a single, spontaneous bang of creativity.

In The Music Lover’s Handbook by Elie Sigmeister, the work of Schubert and Beethoven are contrasted along these lines. Schubert wrote songs, small pieces of fine music. His work operated on spontaneity and inspiration. Beethoven, on the other hand, created vast stretches of sound in longer forms such as the symphony and the concerto. Beethoven worked over his manuscripts and notebooks time and again. Scholars today study his notebooks to analyze the progress of his works from raw inspiration stepwise to the finished work.

What if Edison had spent more time asking if his work was worthwhile? What if he succumbed to feelings of boredom and discouragement? Part of creative work is being a little selfish, a little aloof, a little arrogant. You’d have to be playing deity to even intend on creating characters, scenes, and plots, let alone entire worlds.

Some people can turn off the speculative thoughts and turn on the industrious mind quite easily, while many others struggle to tame their unruly minds. This is where breath, thought, and meditation exercises can help strengthen your ability to intentionally focus on some things while pushing aside others.

Maybe you are in a place where you need to open up, play, expand, and imagine in order to fuel your inspired mind. If so, then turn off your industrious mind, don’t be too logical and serious. Don’t confine yourself to a little world, whether that rigid compartment is your artistic work, your family, your job, your sense of self, or your discouraged gloominess.

On the other hand, turn off the inspired mind and turn on the industrious when you have a piece of work underway. Enter the little world of that creation, and limit your mind’s wanderings. Less time thinking and feeling, more time creating. Don’t predict or expect, just work and sweat and see what the work brings you.

“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.” – Thomas Edison
(source)

More On Mistakes: Make Music that Tells A Story

Apr 162012
 

Stefon Harris has this great discussion on Youtube on the topic of jazz and mistakes. Check it out

Harris says that mistakes are opportunities. If you want to take the music somewhere, you can’t push and pull the others forcefully. You contribute to the motion and color and feeling by listening and responding. Forcing things to go in a certain direction will alienate your collaborators more than inspire them. As long as one accepts the other’s music, then the group plays and creates a big music with deep feeling and meaning.

Let The Musicians Play

I’ll talk about myself a little, though I’m certainly not the perfect example that all musicians should follow. I do tend to take unusual approaches to music sometimes. For example, I don’t tell others what to play very much. I know this has thrown a few of my musical collaborators off a bit, because lots of folks are used to finding a specific part and playing that. “This is my part, and I’ll play it this way.” I figure the music works best for me if every practice and every performance has a spontaneous and present flavor to it. It has to smell and taste like “now.” And I tend to gravitate towards musicians who can put a lot of “now” into their playing.

I once heard an interview where mandolinist David Grisman said that playing with guitarist Doc Watson was always a great experience in the 80s and 90s, because Watson never told anyone in those sessions what to play or how to play. That’s trust and respect.

This “free” approach isn’t a magic formula. Sometimes musicians do need more direction, of course. There are settings, such as orchestral music, where freedom is the opposite of what makes the music come alive. You have to find the approach that works in your situation, so you can’t just follow this or that dogmatically. No matter what the approach your music needs, the trust and respect you give to your collaborators is a potent fuel for feeling a great moment with the music.

Earning and Giving Respect

What if the musicians around you haven’t earned your trust and respect? What if you’re frustrated because they aren’t playing very well? maybe they are playing fine but you’re just in a bad mood. Maybe you just need to give folks a little more room to play. The competitive nature of music and the music biz makes a lot of folks grouchy, arrogant, and disapproving jerks. Watch out so you aren’t becoming one yourself.

(Insert here your favorite memory of a conductor throwing a tantrum, because that is obviously what music is all about.)

Perhaps you are standing next to someone who really doesn’t have his technical chops down solid. If you’re trying to play with someone who is seriously in over his head, that will drag you down. In that case, you can be respectful to the person by trying to help them out as much as you can, even if you can’t trust the musician to stand up to the challenge. We’ve all been in that situation where we’re just struggling and fighting with the music, and nothing good is coming out of it. So be respectful when someone else is struggling, even if you have to shake things up to get the music right. Respect the person even if you can’t respect the music.

There is a difference between technical mistakes and improvising opportunities. You need to have sound musical technique. Bad timing, slowing down the groove, playing out of tune, and making lots of rattle and clunk are not what your audience is listening for. The mistakes can be opportunities for learning and improving, as I wrote in the previous post on this blog.
Bottom line; A lot of bad music is made in the name of “freedom” and “breaking the rules.”

on the other hand,breaking the so-called rules, listening, following, accepting, and trusting are all the breath and heartbeat of the spontaneous improv side of music. Can you follow the rules, break the rules, play freely, play strictly, whatever your approach, and carry the life and the story across to your audience?

Tell A Story

Performing music well is like telling a great story. Folks usually don’t worry if someone makes a few small hesitations, mistakes, and “ums” while telling that great story. People are more interested in you and what you are saying, as long as you are making that story come alive.

Imagine a person who doesn’t speak the lingua franca well because she grew up with a different language as her first tongue. There’s no reason why that person can’t tell a great story despite her limitations in grammer and vocabulary. Carry that over to your music, and you get the point. Try to get the technical things write, but at some point you have to get past musical grammar and spelling. At some point you have to make the story come alive, even within your technical limitations.

John hartford used to say that style is a function of one’s technical limitations. That’s a good thing to tell yourself once in a while. “I can only work within these limits and parameters, so whatever I come up with, that is my style.”
the next time you practice, alone or with others, think about the stories you are trying to tell with your music. What story, picture, and feeling can you speak into each piece of music you practice? Try to go beyond the rote and get to the story behind the notes.

The Attitude Of Abandon

Feb 202012
 

Imagine a bunch of kids in a backyard football game. They play for the pure fun of the game. The game is not a means to an end–just a pleasure in itself. None of them think about the status and wealth that comes to the most gifted athletes. They play because it’s fun to play. The kids abandon all thoughts except the game itself, losing themselves in the moment of the action.

Lose Yourself

How can an artistic personality bring an attitude of abandon to his work?

  • Lose track of time. Set up your schedule so you have some blocks of time to just hang out with your work. Find an afternoon or evening where you don’t have to think about the next thing coming up in an hour. Even better, set up a regular time. “Every Saturday night I stay up late with my sculpture work.”
  • Lose yourself in space. Find a comfortable place where you feel good doing your work. That place might be a typical work area, such as a library or home studio. It might be an unusual place, such as sitting in your car in the park, or on the steps leading up to the attic. Find a place where you can get lost in your work without interruption, even if that means negotiating some spatial boundaries with others in your home.
  • Lose yourself in the work. Produce without worrying about marketability. You can decide which finished pieces you will send out into the public later. First things first–just work and forget everything else. Your imagination has enough material most of the time. It only needs you to struggle through the hard work of choosing, creating, revising, and finishing.

Play games

Give your imagination some freedom, let it run off its leash for a while.

  • A poet who is stuck might try to write the worst poem possible, or she might try writing a love poem to an earthworm.
  • A musician struggling with an intense piece of music could try playing a few lines backward or in a silly rhythm, just for some comic relief.
  • An actor might parody himself, or imitate his cat performing Shakespeare.
  • A novelist could imagine a plot where a large rock is elected prime minister of Canada, and how that would bring about world peace. Or perhaps a story where scientists discover that the number eighty-two doesn’t really exist.
  • An artist could draw cartoons of giant forks and spoons having a dance in the kitchen.

Though these are silly suggestions, there is a serious side to the attitude of abandon. Sometimes the intensity of artistic work makes a soul miserable. Sometimes a creative person holds to tightly to her project. She tries to hard, worries too much about outcomes, and suddenly the joy of the work turns into resentment and harsh self-criticism.

For the artistic personality that feels discouraged or stuck, letting go with the attitude of abandon can help break up the ice around the imagination. What are some things you can do to grow the attitude of abandon in your creative endeavors?

Beautiful Musical Robot

Jul 192011
 

In The Inner Game of Music, Barry Green has a great chapter on integrating the analytical and intuitive sides of the musician’s mind.

Some musicians play from intuition, searching for expressions of beauty, passion, shock, sadness, and joy. The intuitive performer sometimes sounds sappy, gushy, corny, or sloppy because pitch, rhythm, and consistent control are not his foremost concern.

Other musicians are analytical, focusing on playing the notes correctly according to the marks on the page. The extreme form of the analytical musician functions like a musical robot, turning out sounds mechanically while suppressing all creative, human, emotional output.

Most musical kids grow up in the analytical path. They are scolded for inventing noises and improvising on their instruments. Band practice is about playing the correct notes and watching the director. Some kids sit there hardly making a sound so they will not get yelled at.

The intuitive kids are the ones who teach themselves how to play guitar or piano because they are fans of so-and-so. Sometimes there is a pride in being sloppy and untrained. I have met musicians who brag about not being able to read music and not even knowing the names of notes.

The struggle between intuitive and analytical can lead to performance problems. For example, imagine a musician is very intuitive when practicing. She enjoys practicing, enjoys exploring the music, and feels satisfied with her progress in getting more comfortable with her material. But when a performance comes along, she suddenly feels panic. Her analytical mind starts taking over, fueled by a sudden nervous surge of on-stage excitement. “How does that piece start?” “How fast should I play that thing?” “Am I playing that high part in tune?” It’s like having a committee meeting where one important member is brought in at the last second for a vote, but that member complains, “I don’t know what we’re voting on!”

Performance problems can come up for the analytical musician as well. SShe practices precisely, plays with sharp focus, good timing, and the correct articulations. When a performance comes along, she faces her intuitive mind, aroused from its hibernation by on-stage excitement. “What are all those people in the audience going to feel?” “Am I really ready for this?” “What if I sound boring?”

When practicing, notice which area you tend to emphasize. Are there ways to balance the analytical and intuitive sides in your practice?

Think about one of the music teachers you have had. Did that teacher have an emphasis on analytical or intuitive? Or did the teacher show a balance between the two, providing both structure and spontaneity?