I. After reading David Sudnow’s books on learning the play the piano (Ways of the Hand and Talk’s Body) I’ve been thinking about the “handfulness” (his term) of playing and learning music. In practicing improvisation he had to learn to go from playing “wayfully,” that is, through pre-determined and drilled pathways like scales and arpeggios to playing “songfully.” Songful musicians hear the sounds they want (often best accomplished by singing, there is a reason jazz musicians scat) and then develops the instincts, habits, and collections of skills to realize them in sound. Eventually, this songfulness also becomes a handfulness. Your hands learn to find the patterns that fit the song.
This is the open-circuit side of music. A controlled environment where vernacular phrases and gestures are traversed in new combinations, what we call improvisation. The mental space and physical preparation of improvisation is a lot like learning to play basketball or some other team sport. Clearly stated rules and expectations govern the ways of movement that are appropriate to the game and, when well-executed, come off with grace and style. No two basketball games are exactly alike, but any given play is quite similar to something that has happened before. The best players have trained for the most possible contingencies and how to handle them. (e.g. Steph Curry’s warm-up routine.)
Open-circuit skill experts develop vasts networks of motor programs (how the brain runs physical movements) along with task specific sub-routines. These are the subtle differences of movement that allow a five year old to walk and run on nearly every possible terrain, but a toddler can only manage flat and level ground. The five year old has developed many more task specific sub-routines in the “walking” motor program. If you only ever practice scales bottom to top starting on the first note, you shouldn’t expect to be able to jump in to the middle when the band changes chords.
II. “A song is a social organizational device par exellence, a format that quite elegantly coordinates the movements of two or more individuals” (Talk’s Body, p. 105). The same could be said for the rules of any sport or game. They create the expectations that allow coordinated movement and enforce punishment (fouls, penalty flags, time out for big tough hockey players) for those that violate them. On the macro level they create such things as Symphony Orchestras and the Olympic Games, perhaps the largest peaceful international cooperative event.
We don’t have the same formal punishments in music, but expectations are enforced socially. You won’t be asked back to the jam if you’re a showboat or can’t hang with the beat. If you try to play a jazzy solo in a rock-based jam band you’ll be a misfit. Blues has some of the strictest stylistic constraints of them all. In the fusion era we live in there is a lot less stylistic gatekeeping, but bluesmen of a previous generation were fiercely protective of the traditional sounds of blues.
III. On the other side of the spectrum are closed-circuit skills. This is all classical music, but also a lot of virtuosic metal (most of which is not improvised but worked out in advance) and a lot of fingerstyle guitar and folk music. Most genres more flexibility than classical music, but “the song” is essentially set down in writing or oral tradition and recreated roughly the same way each performance. The ability to recreate an ideal version of the music after extensive rehearsal is the territory of classical musicians, figure skaters, and gymnasts over all others. (Many years ago I realized that almost all the popular American sports are open-circuit team competitions—baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer—but that most of our favorite Olympic sports are soloistic, closed-circuit sports like gymnastics, diving, even skiing and oddities like bobsled to some extent.)
The ways of training for these different kinds of performance are quite different. Perhaps they are the difference between preparing to play Hamlet and preparing for an oral argument before the Supreme Court. To do Hamlet (closed-circuit) justice you have to memorize all the lines of course, but you also have to internalize all the thoughts and feelings he is processing throughout the play. Then you have to say them in the way you think will communicate the best. This is nearly identical to preparing to play a classical piece effectively, you are just dealing with the world of sound and gesture rather than word and action.
When you go before SCOTUS as oral advocate, you don’t know what you will be asked. Or at least you don’t know exactly **what you will be asked, but if you belong there you what the possibilities are and you have prepared accordingly. A successful advocate can actively navigate all aspects of a case and argument depending on the questions asked. The best even adjust their manner and attitude according to the tone of questions from the justices. These are the equivalent of task specific sub-routines. After the very brief prepared speech (”playing the head” as jazz people say), it is all improv. If you pull up to the jazz jam you don’t know what tunes will be called, but if you can’t play Cherokee, Stella by Starlight, All of Me, and twenty or thirty of the other most commonly played tunes then you really aren’t prepared.
IV. A curious habit of mind music students develop is to think about their hands as technology. Over years of practice the hands develop ways of moving and manipulating your instrument that seem to take on an alien quality. Around age sixteen I saw a video of myself playing the guitar and had something like an out of body experience. It was clearly me and my hands doing this playing, but I couldn’t imagine it was possible I actually did it. It seemed that some force was impelling my hands around the guitar in a way I didn’t fully understand.
And indeed, I did not fully understand it. I had been practicing essentially mindlessly, repeating the same things over and over again for rote muscle memory. In this way I learned to play some very difficult music, but performance was always on a knife edge. One misstep on this very narrow path I had gone down thousands of times and it would fall apart. Good preparation accounts for this by playing a piece in as many different ways as can be devised to account for the irregularities of live performance and playing with nerves.
This kind of practicing is from the hands up. Input is primarily from the hands, and the executive function does something like a pass/fail evaluation. “That attempt sounded bad.” “That attempt sounded good.” And then some are better or worse.
Practicing in this mode is wildly inefficient. The solution to the bad attempts is always another attempt. Wishful thinking, of course, that the hands will magically find the right pathway after traversing the wrong pathway dozens of times in a row. As I try to drill into my students, after you have played a mistake the most likely thing you will play the next time is… a mistake. This is something like the plateau of ability Sudnow hit after he had developed his “chops” on scales and arpeggios, but still couldn’t pull off stylistic improvisation. He had to lead the hands rather than follow them.
Learning the practice from the brain down is a major step for developing musicians. Careful analytical thought is the first step to progress, but it is primarily analysis of the hands and their ways of moving in relation to the music. Wisdom on an instrument comes from knowing what kinds of movements will be secure in the stressful environment of live performance and which won’t. ”Fingering is destiny” is another of our studio mottos. This kind of mental work creates an integrated connection from brain to hands that holds up to pressure much better. Rather than throwing your hands at the task hoping they bring it off because they have in practice, you are actively in control and making constant adjustments based on feedback. The brain tells the hands what to do, but the hands also respond with whether what is asked feels good. This is where the “songful” and “handful” nature of playing well come together. The mind and body in harmony.
V. Another element of handfulness in music—which you might remember is where this rumination began—is in the composing of music itself. My current concert program is all works by guitarists or lutenists. This is an interesting context to observe hand-based thinking. It’s clear that each of these pieces has a firm rootedness in the topography of the instrument. Though they aren’t easy by any means, the music doesn’t demand from the instrument something it isn’t good at. The best player-composers have independent musical ideas of course. A sure sign of hack-work is music that follows common patterns or relies completely on instrument-specific effects. But even the best pieces are molded by a deep knowledge of terrain, texture, and the possibilities of four fingers playing six strings. This music “fits the hand” as we say, and allows the instrument to speak in its natural voice. It’s an absolute joy to play.