By Paul Klemperer

It is a simple idea that your mental state affects your actions. When you start a task, your mood, your attitude toward that task, and the various things floating around in your head, will all influence how you approach that task. Some tasks are ingrained habits, like brushing your teeth, or washing the dishes. Your biggest decision for a habitual task is just to do it; once the decision is made you can go on autopilot. Some tasks require constant concentration and an act of will to see the task through. These are more challenging, but also are the accomplishments that help you grow.

Music practice involves both approaches, habitual tasks and tasks requiring constant concentration. On a good day, practicing is fun, invigorating, and time seems to fly by. On a bad day, practicing is frustrating, exhausting, and time seems to creep by like an injured snail. That’s just the way it is, because your mental state goes through changes from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. Wouldn’t it be great if you could control your mental state all the time, just tell yourself to be happy, positive and full of energy, no matter what drudgery awaited you, no matter what problems you had to deal with? Some people are that way. They just take a deep breath, shrug off their worries, and greet the day with a smile. Those people can be very irritating for the rest of us.

But even if you can’t control your mental state, can’t just decide to be in a good mood, you can be aware of your mental state. You can accept who you are, and what is going on inside your head. You don’t have to avoid it, excuse it, or try to change it. But if you notice it, pay attention to it, you can understand it better, and this will actually make you a better musician. Here’s why: Your mental state is a complicated mixture of all your experiences. You carry your past around with you all the time, the distant past all the way to the very recent past. Your habits, hopes, fears, accomplishments and failures, are all hanging out in your head. These aren’t just things, facts, sitting there like old photographs or books you read one summer. They are actively part of you, and they affect how you play music. In a sense they are your team, your scout troop, your ragtag band of misfit commandos, and you are the group leader.

So while it is a simple idea that your mental state affects your actions, it is not so simple to understand the many components of your mental state, and how they combine to influence the tasks that your body carries out in the physical realm. But it helps if you think of all the parts of you as a team: Your body, your mind, your reflexes, your memories, all these things come together in the act of making music, in the moment when sound replaces silence.

This self-awareness doesn’t have to be a complicated process. It exists in the moment, and it is a matter of just paying attention to yourself. Always remember that the goal, the task, is just to play music. The goal isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to “do it right.” And the goal certainly isn’t to be like anyone else. Just try to play the music, and notice what your team is doing when that happens. Paying attention to yourself, your mental state as you practice music, can lead to better musicianship and maybe even more self-awareness in other parts of your life.

Here are a few examples I have found in my own practice habits and those of my students:

Fumbling Fingers. You try to play a particular phrase of written music and your fingers keep missing the notes. It’s not that hard, you understand the music, you should be able to do it, and yet you keep fumbling. Stupid fingers! Why won’t you play it right?!

Obviously, there is a breakdown in the line of communication from eyes to brain to fingers. Your fingers are notifying you of this snafu. Don’t get angry at your fingers; they are just telling you that they aren’t getting the information they need. Is the information coming too fast, is it garbled?

The first thing I do in this kind of situation is to slow down. If you are playing a new phrase, your fingers may not have developed the muscle memory for that phrase. Find the tempo where your fingers can play the phrase in a relaxed way, without tension. Why were you playing the phrase faster than this? Maybe that’s how you heard it, maybe you thought “that’s how it is supposed to go.” Try hearing it at the slower tempo where your fingers can play it. Get your ear, mind and fingers working as a team. Keep track of that smooth synchronized feeling when the team works together. Then you can gradually increase the tempo without losing that feeling. Gradually this concentration will move into the area of habit.

The problem may not just be about muscle memory. One of my students tends to be ruled by his ear. He plays what his ear remembers, even if it is not written on the page. His fingers fumble because they are being told one thing by the eye and another by the ear. What comes out is a garbled mixture of both. For a long time he didn’t know why his fingers fumbled. He thought the music was too difficult for him, but really he was trying to play two different things at the same time. I had him play the phrase with his eyes closed, and it came out perfectly, the way his ear remembered it. Then I had him play it slowly from the written part and he could play that version as well. He realized that when he tried to play the part at tempo, his eyes would lag behind and his ears would take over. The team would stop working together and chaos ensued. Once he consciously realized this, it was easier for his ears to hear both versions and to choose the written version, coordinating with his eyes.

Another student tends to be ruled by his eyes, and his eyes wander. Whatever he sees, he tends to play, even if it’s an ant walking across the top of the page. Rationally, he knows that the ant isn’t part of the music, yet his eyes tell his brain to focus on the ant, his brain tells his fingers “Play ant!” and his fingers fumble around looking for the ant button on the clarinet (there are so many buttons and holes, one of ‘em must be the ant button). Why do his eyes do this? Why do they sabotage the team?

When he tries to force his eyes to focus on the notes, he is prone to more mistakes, not less. His eyes can’t let go of that ant (or whatever distraction is on the page; a smudge, a chord symbol above the staff, an irregular space caused by the music notation software). But if he stops, takes the time to consciously examine whatever is distracting him, understand why it is there, then he can move on, and play the music. Sometimes, if you just acknowledge that something is distracting you, it will stop distracting you.

It really does help to think of yourself as a group leader. As individuals we think we should have it together, that we function as rational beings. But there is always a bunch of stuff going on inside us, and rational, focused and efficient action is often more of a dream than a reality. You have to start with where you are at and build from there. Yelling at yourself, setting unrealistic goals, doesn’t help. You can achieve your goals, but you can’t rush towards them.

If you take this approach with yourself, leading the team of body and mind as you practice, you will become a better leader when you play with others. There are definite correlations between the way an individual approaches music and the way a group of musicians approaches music. Both respond to the demands music places on them. If you are sensitive to what is going on within yourself when you practice, you will learn a lot more than you may at first realize.

S is For Social Investment

P.K.

A subject near and dear to most of our hearts is SEX. The subject itself can be looked at in so many different ways, from the purely personal to the abstractly impersonal. I remember reading about a clinical study that showed the average American adult male thought about sex once every ten seconds. This seems like a conservative estimate. I’m not sure what the study said about averages for adult females, though it may not have been as easy to quantify. Ladies, your thoughts?

Given that I will probably think about sex at least once every ten seconds, I try to turn this mental proclivity into a creative endeavor, make it more interesting than just a Pavlovian response, a dog salivating at the sound of a bell. One way of doing this is to expand sexual thinking into the realm of sensual thinking. Thus we add dimension to our lustful imaginations. Sexy clothes, sexy food, sexy sounds… things that stimulate the senses in a more generalized way can help expand the male imagination and differentiate us from rutting barnyard animals. I guess that’s another way of saying “being romantic.”

Now, it is no big stretch to say that bringing a creative attitude to sexuality and sensuality is a good thing. Thousands of tabloid and fluff magazine articles say this every day. But the bigger issue is to look at our national, global, genetic obsession with sex, and examine the question of what this obsession really means. What made me think of this today was some statistics I came across regarding internet commerce. In 1998, the money spent purchasing online content was $1.4 billion. Adult websites accounted for 70% of that. Some might argue that the porn industry was just quicker than other sectors to cash in on the internet. But by 2003, when the online market had grown to greater than $5 billion, porn still accounted for about 60% of it.

Calling this huge investment of time and money in sex an “obsession” is both an understatement and reflects a faulty analysis. An obsession implies an imbalance, a disorder, a condition which could be corrected. But sex is an integral part of being human, and many people believe that the importance we place on it is more natural and healthy than attempts to deny, suppress or belittle it. In fact, one could argue that the huge porn industry is just a small segment of the much larger total social investment in sex, everything from Valentine’s day cards to Viagra, from condoms to Coppertone tans, from Maybelline to marriage counselors.

In fact, it is possible that sex is the most important thing in our society, if we judge the importance of a thing by the time, energy and resources invested in it. I’m sure a statistical comparison has been done somewhere of the things we value the most in our society, and I’m willing to bet that sex is high up there, if not at the top of the list. We say that we value certain things above others, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but let’s look at the walk we walk, not just the talk we talk. I would say War and Sex are our top priorities.

Now I want to bring up a theme which I didn’t invent, so please don’t kill the messenger. The idea derives from the work of Emile Durkheim, who has been called by some, “the father of sociology.” Be that as it may, he had some cool insights. His work influenced future generations, and one of his seminal studies was on the role of religion in society. He has been paraphrased as saying that “society is God,” which is an oversimplification. A better quote is this: “If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.” Theists and atheists can debate the finer points of this, but I bring up Durkheim to illustrate the idea that if we want to understand what is really important to us, we should look at what our society does, what it produces, what it spends its wealth on. The rest is lip service. You can make all kinds of pretty, flowery speeches, but where does the money go?

Here’s another quote from Monsieur Emile: “For we know today that a religion does not necessarily imply symbols and rites, properly speaking, or temples and priests. This whole exterior apparatus is only the superficial part. Essentially, it is nothing other than a body of collective beliefs and practices endowed with a certain authority.” In other words, the trappings of religion are less important than the ideas and acts which people carry out. Individuals are often not fully aware of the system of beliefs that guide them. They do things out of habit, or out of a lesser idea, unaware that they are functioning as part of a larger network, a greater social fabric which may be called the religious identity of their society.

Here’s the kicker: Since its inception, the United States has had an uneasy relationship with organized religion. Ostensibly we are a secular nation that allows freedom of all religions. But the idea of a Christian nation, or a Judeo-Christian nation, or a European Judeo-Christian nation, has been linked to the national identity since the days of the Pilgrims. It comes back to haunt us whenever there is a question of who we are as a nation. Of course, the movers and shakers who run the show don’t want to officially endorse this idea, but they consistently hint at it when they invoke God, the flag, and all the usual knee-jerk political ploys. But they are right in one sense: As a nation we do have a religion. This religion is defined by what we believe in, what we devote our time, energy and resources to. And that religion is Sex. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that our national religion is War. Various schools of thought argue one or the other. Some argue both. Personally, if I have to choose, I’ll go for Sex.

If anyone in Austin is planning to buy a car, I should warn you that I recently bought a car from Southpoint Pontiac and they treated me very badly. I have waited over a month for them to make things right, but they are acting like typical sleazy car salesmen and ignoring me, expecting me to just go away. So I am posting this as a warning to others. The synopsis: they sold me a damaged car without disclosing the damage. When I told them of the damage (mechanical repairs costing $1300), they refused to fix the problem. They made thousands of dollars profit off of me and totally blew me off. The next step is legal action, which when it comes to the world of auto sales, is a long and confusing process. Car dealers have the advantage here, and they expect victimized customers to get worn down by the process and just give up. You would expect national big name dealerships to operate more honestly, with the goal of customer satisfaction, but as far as Southpoint Pontiac is concerned, they treated me no better than any other two-bit used car operation. If anyone out there has similarly been cheated by Southpoint Pontiac, please let me know.
Paul Klemperer

On the whole, politically active religious groups make me nervous. The hypocrisy and hate bubbles just under the surface of their self-righteous proclamations. In the hands of evangelical activists, religion is at best the opiate of the masses; most of the time it functions more as the meth lab of the masses. So it’s a breath of fresh air (more like a small whiff) to hear that some Christian evangelicals have joined together to advocate the “Evangelical Climate Initiative,” a broad-based campaign to organize Christians to fight global warming.
If we look at the history of environmentalism in the U.S. it is not such a stretch to see how normally conservative religious groups could move toward a more open-minded agenda. Prominent early environmentalists, conservationists, and earth-friendly philosophers came from wealthy white conservative backgrounds. The poster boy for conservation in the modern age was Teddy Roosevelt. Recreational hunters and sportsmen saw the danger of rampant industrialization and urban expansion without legislation to protect the environment. It is really an old idea that we are “stewards” of nature and should not gluttonously consume our natural resources. Social philosophers at the dawn of the industrial age were interpreting the book of Genesis in this way. So for evangelical Christians to embrace this definition of stewardship is really not a new thing, but rather an acceptance of a very old idea.
The problem is that American Christians have been allied philosophically and materially with business pretty much since the days of the Pilgrims. There is a fundamental religious contradiction in America, dating back to our cultural origins. The Protestant ethic brought from Europe had two contradictory ideas: Spiritual truth and faith should be more important than human material needs, but a good Christian works hard and prospers. As soon as they wiped their feet on Plymouth rock, the founding fathers began duking it out. Greed is bad, money is the root of all evil. Bam! No, God rewards the righteous with His bounty. Material success is a sign that God favors you. Pow! The New World is a second Garden of Eden. We should treasure, respect and preserve it. Biff! No, the world is profane. We must fill it with God’s grace by transforming it into a civilized, orderly thing. Socko!
And so it went, the two philosophies jostling each other like feuding siblings, which they were. The current debate within Christian evangelical circles is just a continuation of this historical contradiction. While 86 evangelical leaders support the Evangelical Climate Initiative, some of the nation’s most high-profile evangelical leaders have tried to derail it. Twenty-two of them signed a letter in January declaring, “Global warming is not a consensus issue.” Among the signers were Charles W. Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Come on big money!
Their letter was sent to the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization of churches and ministries, which had started to move in the direction of opposing global warming last year. The letter from the 22 leaders asked the National Association of Evangelicals not to issue any statement on global warming or to allow its officers or staff members to take a position. The message seems to be: “Money talks, so shut up already.”
I don’t think any of the eco-friendly Christian groups will be in the forefront of progressive action on the environment. But just the fact that conservative religious organizations are not monolithically united behind big business is cause for optimism. Maybe in between the preaching and platitudes they can disseminate some factual information to their congregations and raise the level of basic environmental knowledge in this country.

I watched the funeral and the eulogies on cable news like so many others. There were brief moments where I felt connected, felt the power of the ongoing message. And there were many moments where I felt detached, merely a spectator, fighting my own cynicism as opportunists paraded before the camera and spouted platitudes.
It was both painful and amusing to watch Bush, jr. sitting uncomfortably in front of 10,000 people, having to listen to an agenda different than his own. But I’m sure it was like water off a duck’s back for him. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the earpiece from his i-pod in his ear, helping him to zone out the critics with some good ol’ black-derived jams.
An errant thought… I caught some of the eulogizing on CNN, with closed captioning, which always involves a lot of typos. One was classic: The speaker was explaining that Coretta King had actually helped MLK develop his political and international perspective. He was not her mentor in this regard, but rather the other way around. The speaker was saying that she was his “muse” in some ways. But the closed captioning printed “she was his mousse.” This got me to thinking about muse vs. mousse. One inspires and leads you, the other just helps you look good. So a person could be your mousse in the way that a trophy wife makes a man look more successful. a muse works on a deeper level, though you can’t fault a person for wanting a good hairdo…

The Small Things
File this under “World Going To Hell”…

It seems like it gets harder each day to have a larger philosophical outlook, a positive, spiritual view of where it’s all going and what it all means. I meet many people who have a spiritual center, and I guess we all need one, whether it’s overt or subliminal. But the people who enthusiastically believe in something are often quite scary, and in these times the believers get even more scary.

For me the solution (or at least temporary bandaid) has been to think small, believe in the deep and simple truths. I play my saxophone, learn a new lick, write a new song. I teach a student a new musical idea. I have a really good espresso, and sit and watch a really beautiful woman walk by on a really beautiful day. I share a really good bottle of wine with some really good friends. Meanwhile president Bush snorts another billion dollars up his military-industrial nostril; maybe a billion for each nostril, just to keep an even keel. But I had a really good espresso, so I don’t let it bug me.

I learn at least one new and interesting thing per day, one amusing factoid. Such as Josef Strauss (overshadowed by Johann Strauss) was a gifted composer who died quite young. Makes me think, “How many other relatives of famous people were also gifted and productive, yet they are mostly overlooked?”

Again, it helps to focus on the little things. You may not become famous, and the famous people may be squandering the wealth of the world for their own misguided and small-minded reasons. But if you don’t let all their antics distract you and demoralize you, you can still do some good work that someone, somewhere, someday, may benefit from.

It’s too easy in this media-inundated society to be a passive receptacle for all the fluff, lies, spin and various other time-wasting but enticingly packaged crap that is shoved at us. I was raised on television and subconsciously I think it will comfort me. I turn on my homely tv set whilst I eat my bowl of bachelor chow. Half the time it keeps me company, but the other half it drains the energy from me like a big friendly electronic tic. I know there are many out there like me, and with the increasing spate of electronic media devices, the passive condition is only getting exacerbated.

So, again, I try to focus on the small things… While my beloved tv tells me that Bush wants to cut billions from social services while he asks for double that amount for (increased) war expenditures, I go off to the kitchen and wash a dish or two, write a song lyric, do a yoga stretch, and remember just to be glad i’m in the game…