Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Inhabiting the Notes

My flute practice, ever since I began taking lessons from Raanan Eylon, has been akin to wrestling with a Zen koan: How does a musician get inside the notes he plays?
What does it mean to get inside the notes?
How can you tell whether someone else, who is playing, is inside the notes?
Can you feel as if you're inside the notes and not be there?
There is something deeply frustrating about this pursuit, because "being in the notes" is a metaphor for something that's undefinable.
Maybe "notes" is entirely the wrong term.
It's the sound, not the notes. My musical guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, said that you have to find a sound that you love, that getting a sound that you love is the beginning and the end of music-making.
Raanan talks about seeking the center of the sound. That's a metaphor, too, but it's easier for me to grasp. I think about focusing the sound, another metaphor, but more accessible to me.
What will happen once I manage to get into the notes?
The truth is: what's the point of playing at all, if you're not trying to get into the notes?
Raanan contends that most musicians do not get into the notes they play.
Recently I read that some musicians enter a kind of hypnotic state when they perform solos. That would be getting so far into the notes, that you aren't anywhere else. I think that would also apply to playing in an ensemble, when you're involved, when you're listening to what everyone else is playing and the way what you play fits into it.

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Monday, January 13, 2014

Extinctions

I have just read a two part article by Elizabeth Kolbert that appeared in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/23/131223fa_fact_kolbert. Her point is that we are now living in an age of mass extinctions, caused by ourselves, and, most likely, we will also cause our own extinction.
My first response was predictable, and what she was aiming at, I assume: Let's do everything we can to prevent this catastrophe from happening! But since then, I've been wondering whether it makes any difference.
After all, the mass extinction of humanity is inevitable. Does anyone seriously believe that in, say, a million years, there will still be human beings anywhere in the universe? Kolbert mentions the five mass extinctions known to paleontologists, and states, as the following link also does, that we have entered a sixth extinction event (http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html), and that we are its cause.
The last such event took place 65 million years ago, and the enormous biodiversity of the world, which existed before humans started killing off other species, shows that, from the earth's point of view, from the point of view of the life force, not only was there a recovery from that event, but the extinction of certain species (such as large and hungry reptiles) created an opportunity for us warm-blooded creatures to proliferate. So when we all go, something else will thrive, multiply, diversify, and fill the earth up again. And after another fifty million years or so, something bad will happen to them, and they, too, will become extinct. The whole process will start over again, repeatedly, until the sun flares up and engulfs the earth.
Obviously I want my grandchildren to grow up in a safe world, where they can live fulfilling lives, and I am very sad to think that this is rather unlikely, if present trends continue. But I'm not convinced that, in any metaphysical sense, it matters.
We individuals only matter to ourselves, the people we love, and the people who love us. We are not all that important in the universe.
We are all going to die, some painfully, some young, some gently, some violently, and in a hundred years, no living memory of us will remain. Some of us might have produced something that will still be valued after we die, but most of us won't.
We have a clear selfish interest, as a species, in preventing the destruction of the natural world around us, which sustains us, and maybe we will manage to get our act together and do it. We also might manage to poison the biosphere so thoroughly that life will face a setback so serious that it will take it a billion years to recover. But, unlike us, the world has time.