Become more present by acknowledging the uncomfortable

Avoiding pain, embarrassment, humiliation. We all do our best to avoid uncomfortable emotions. When we're angry or hurt, we try really hard to get back to a more peaceful state. What would happen if we chose to remain with the painful feelings and acknowledge their presence? What would happen if we realized that we have a say in the matter and that we have an array of possibilities to choose from, rather than the ones that emotion may dictate for us?

Life, with all its twists and turns, can not stay in homeostasis like our biological systems. Life instead seems to have more bad moments than good. Personally, 2012 wasn't a particularly good year but I learned a lot of lessons that I will strive not to forget when the times are good.

What does this have to do with music? The image of the suffering and starving artist is a widespread one in our western culture. We become artists not to make money but to create and move people towards change. Some of the most powerful music has been born from misery.

If you would like to become more present or mindful, accepting rather than fighting what is happening at any given time is a critical skill to develop. The hardest lesson for me in all this has been accepting that while my emotions are real, they do not define me. You can accept difficult situations for what they are, but you can simply notice the emotions they produce. They do not have to control you. Biologically, we feel emotions but research tells us that they take about 90 seconds to pass through the body (if we choose to let them go).

Acknowledge and accept. There are so many ways we can apply this to practice and performance of music.

Here's a way to start in the practice room: when you're having a bad day, it's incredibly difficult to not judge yourself. Any element that isn't going well becomes the focal point of your attention and you gradually pull yourself more and more away from the music itself.

When you notice frustration creeping in, stop and take a moment to notice that frustration and accept it. This doesn't mean that you have to stay with the frustration but instead, you can make a choice about what it is you want to do next. If you choose to stay frustrated, you will choose to remain focused on the element that isn't flowing (such as your tone). Another choice you can make is to step away from the instrument and go do something else for a little while.

Finally, a third choice could be to focus on the wider picture and find something positive in your playing. I can guarantee that you're not going to feel comfortable or even happy about having to play in a frustrated state, but if you choose to not let the frustration control your choices, the negative judgmental voices will dissipate. You may even be able to end the practice session in a productive groove.

Life is all about how we choose to respond to curveballs. Practicing is all about how we choose to respond to our expectations. If we let our emotions control us, choices get made for us. Conscious, mindful decision making can keep us in the game.

Less thinking, more doing

I've been quiet lately after having my most prolific year on The Sensible Flutist. One of my goals had been to have two new posts up a week but after a while, these began to feel contrived and forced. One of my favorite aspects of this blog is how I can write based on inspiration. If I don't want to write, I don't have to. Readers keep coming and I appreciate them greatly.

When I was in the throes of moving in the summertime, I was writing a lot on various life and musical lessons I was discovering in the process. I learned a lot about myself in those tumultuous months when my husband needed a job and we suddenly needed to find a new place to live. I felt I had something to share as I had to scramble to meet basic needs. Life wasn't comfortable.

Now that life is somewhat comfortable again, I'm trying to do a little more. I'm trying to better utilize the time I have available to make some other projects come to fruition. My output may be small, but I'm proud of it.

I have a project list tacked onto my corkboard that I look at daily. I purposely kept it simple. Life is a moving target and I know that I have to keep my number of projects small. This is easier said than done.

For the time being, I'm spending less time thinking about issues and more time putting my ideas into motion. Writing is an incredibly important tool for me, but I feel an innate need for concrete action.

Let's all do more, shall we?

Guest Post: Art in Life is Art

I love music for many reasons, and one of those reasons is the ability for it to inspire relationships.  Relationships among notes, among performers who may be strangers, and relationships among friends.  There are also relationships between the music and the performer.  By living your life, you provide a lens of interpretation that can have a dramatic effect on your music.

I want to talk about my awakening of this belief and how I've applied my life experiences to a specific piece of music.  And then I'll respond to one of Alexis' earlier postings on life experiences affecting performance. 

I need to take you to a spring day in Washington, where I was in a tiny room in an old building for a saxophone lesson.  I had practiced the Karg-Elert Caprice 'X. Cubana' and had just finished playing through the piece.

"Where's the passion?"  My professor, Bob Miller, looked at me with a discerning eye.  I asked,  "What are you talking about?  Do you want more vibrato?"  [Full-disclosure: I was a freshman at this time.]  My professor laughed, or maybe it was closer to a chuckle.  "When I'm playing passionate music, I think of my wife."

He begins to play the etude, but with a soul and feeling that doesn't sound as robotic and MIDI-fied as my rendition.   After a few lines of music, Bob turns to me.  "Playing music is like holding a pretty girl's hand."  And that's when it became one of those defining moments in my musical understanding.

See, in the especially troubling time of adjusting to college life, I hadn't thought about what I was trying to communicate through my music.  I was playing rote and inconsistent because my own thoughts were transitory.  Bob Miller had told me many times that music comes from your head, out of your horn, and back into your head.  It took me a few years to figure out what he was actually saying to me.

You see, I had not thought about art in the sense of a delivery system.  Music provides a tangible format to connect ideas through emotions and experiences we've had in our lives.  In effect, your life experience becomes the engine to the work's vessel.

And this whole concept of creating art as creating a vessel might visually resemble the circle of head-horn-head.  Within this vessel, you provide a means of emotional contextualization for the person experiencing this art.  So Bob wasn't necessarily talking about music ending up in the performer's head, but anyone who happens to be opening up themselves to hear the vessel in the sound is the end result of the circle.

Playing music like holding a pretty girl's hand means to have an intention to believe fully in the act that you're doing.  Our life experiences become powerful tools to invest belief in the music we create as well as the experiences we share with other people.  Sometimes that experience is shared with a particular pretty girl.

Whenever I play 'Cubana' these days, I think of my wonderful girlfriend and I on the streets of Barcelona and all of the smells.  Never before had I been to a country that smelled like Spain did; two parts perfume and flowers to one part food.  Images of the Placa d'Espanya and particularly the awesome Gaudi cathedral come into mind.  With a title like 'Cubana', I'm safe to assume that Karg-Elert wasn't thinking of Barcelona, but the association is so strong with me that it fills my mind whenever I play that piece.  For me, that experience becomes the piece whenever I hear it.

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Now I'll respond to Alexis' post about enriching your art with your life.  Music takes many forms and shapes, and the uniqueness in which we express these forms is what makes our music making beautiful.  Beautiful in this case can mean haunting, exuberant, mystical, crushing, sublime, or any other adjective that could describe the mixture of emotions that we experience as humans.

It's the same concept that great novels employ: give enough detail to the reader to get a general sense contextualization, but leave the larger details up to the reader to fill in.  That ambiguity is powerful for making people connect and believe in the art.  But it starts with a seed based off an idea that the artist had in mind when creating.  As a performer, you're bound to the notes and inherent form of the piece, but you can provide the water that makes the seed of the music bloom to your idea of a plant.

This active enriching requires an awareness of your life and emotions.  The more you open your life to your contextualization of music, the more your music resonates with the experiences you want to share. You've taken the first step towards understanding.  Live your life and enjoy your music and both will be strengthened.

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Jeff Tecca is a saxophonist who studied at Pacific Lutheran University and received a Bachelors of Music in Composition in 2010.  He currently writes for chamber ensembles and K-12 wind bands.  Jeff also plays guitar and bass in his pop band, Paraloco.  He runs a blog about his music at bluecavalier.wordpress.com, his band's blog at paraloco.wordpress.com, and can be reached by email at jefftecca@gmail.com and on twitter at @jtecc.