Playing a Tune Over Symphonies of Self-Doubt : Music Educators’ Conference in Harmony Over Methods of Music Making

It is perhaps a sign of these topsy-turvy times that the major speakers at a recent music educators’ conference included:

--A tennis expert who has still not fully recovered from being kicked out of his third-grade glee club.

--A bassist who demonstrated how endearingly he could play “Greensleeves” off key.

--A neurologist who’s written a book titled “Tone Deaf and All Thumbs? An Invitation to Music-Making for Late Bloomers and Non-Prodigies.”

Door Open to Anyone

All three had come to remind the music teachers of America that anyone can partake wholeheartedly in the sensual delights, the abandon, the rapture and the embarrassments of musical performance.

Consider the off-key musician and his cohort, the glee club flunky turned tennis virtuoso.

Six years ago, Barry Green, the principal bassist for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, teamed up with Tim Gallwey, author of the “The Inner Game of Tennis,” to write the recently published “The Inner Game of Music” (Anchor Press/Doubleday).

Gallwey has always maintained that the most lethal opponent a tennis player faces is not on the other side of the net but inside his own head. So he devised mind games to outwit this more devastating adversary.

In “The Inner Game of Music,” Green provides variations to tackle the similar demons of fear and self-doubt prancing in the skulls of musicians.

And in Gallwey’s estimation, Green “was the perfect candidate to do the translation of the Inner Game to music. He had plenty of self-interferences, plenty of obstacles to greatness.”

When Gallwey presented his writing partner to those attending the Music Educators National Conference, he warned the group Green would perform for them. “You’ll see great examples of greatness,” he confidently predicted, with a sly gleam in his eyes, “or equally great examples of what gets in the way of greatness.”

Secret Thoughts on Display

As Green launched into “Greensleeves,” a tape player simultaneously broadcast some prerecorded thoughts from his mind:

“Settle down. Show this group you have the Inner Game together.”

“Perhaps someone will want to buy your book or your records.”

“You’re playing out of tune.”

” . . . That was a pretty rocky start.”

“Tim Gallwey will probably disown me.”

“I feel sick . . . .”

The crowd roared with laughter--and, apparently, recognition--as Green’s performance moved swiftly from mediocre to pitiful.

“When we’re at our best, doing everything we need to do, do we hear that voice of fear?” Green asked his seemingly entranced listeners. “When we engage in dialogue with that voice, it takes us away from our ultimate goal: connecting with the music.”

So how do you disconnect the voice of fear?

Increasing one’s awareness of something else is a method Gallwey and Green consider to be effective--on the tennis court or in the concert hall.

On tennis courts, for instance, Gallwey is fond of asking a player to count the number of times the ball spins as it approaches the racket. It’s a gimmick used to overwhelm mental distractions such as “Am I looking good?” or “My backhand is lousy.” In addition, counting spins simultaneously helps players keep their eyes on the ball.

The idea, Gallwey told the group, is for the player to lose himself in the ball. “The more the person loses himself in the ball, the better the ball gets hit and the player says, ‘Who did that?’ . . . Letting go is implied in focusing (giving full attention to the ball or a measure of music). It really is the foundation of mental health.”

Suffers From Tendinitis

To demonstrate, Gallwey called for a musician in the audience who was having some difficulty. Kim Blake, a violinist for 15 years, volunteered, indicating she suffered from tendinitis, “which acts up in stress situations.”

Gallwey instructed her to play a few phrases on the violin and asked if the tendinitis “acted up.”

“No,” Blake replied, “but I’m shaking. My heart’s fluttering.”

Asked to place the flutter on a scale of 0 to 10, she ranked it a 9. Gallwey then invited her to “check out the scariest-looking people in the audience and notice particularly what’s scary about them.”

When Blake again checked her heart flutter level, it had suddenly fallen to a 5. Then Gallwey requested that she play the passage again, without trying to make the flutter go down, merely noticing what it’s like to play with a 5-level of heart flutter.

Flutter-Crash

When Blake finished, she announced that her flutter had crashed to a 2.

What was going on here? How did analyzing scary faces help the violinist to get relatively lost in her music and unwittingly reduce her heart flutter from 9 to 2?

“Awareness of what is (flutter level) doesn’t make it go down,” Gallwey explained. “All I’ve found is that in a state of awareness, excellence comes out more.”

In another part of this musical dog-and-pony show, Green invited a woman who had never played the bass before to attempt to do so with two different types of instruction.

In the first, obviously exaggerated and ill-fated attempt, Green told Nancy Tarbell, “Don’t be so stiff here. . . . I want you to hold the bow right past your thumb, right here . . . don’t grab so hard. Relax this hand. . . . Over here, the fingers have to be 1 inches apart. No. That’s 1 inches.”

Then, in response to her apparent frustration and nervousness, Green reminded her of his right to be so picky. He told Tarbell he was instructing her on “all the right things to do--and I’m the professional.”

When he finally asked her to “play a good sound,” she played a meek noise he instantly pronounced “not very good.”

In “The Inner Game of Music,” Green and Gallwey call this type of teaching “do this” instruction; they contend it typically increases a student’s anxiety, confusion, doubt and frustration.

As an alternative, Green demonstrated “awareness instruction,” which merely asks the learner to pay attention to what is happening.

So Green simply advised Tarbell, “If you see me doing something, just notice what I do and do it.” Period.

He then placed a piece of tape over his mouth and communicated only through his bass and non-verbal movements, all of which were buoyantly encouraging. He played a note. She would try to match it. No verbal instruction on how to do it. In a couple of minutes, Tarbell had marginally mastered four notes--enough for a little song.

Suddenly, she was playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for the crowd and singing it simultaneously as well. Then Green got her to play and sing it up-tempo to a feverish taped accompaniment. The audience of music teachers applauded wildly and shouted “Bravo! Bravo!”

Playing Bass

What’s more, Tarbell said she had a good time learning to play the bass in front of about 1,000 people.

“I just want to point out the quality of the performance,” Gallwey told the audience, “but what’s even more rare is to be a first-time performer and say you had a wonderful time, to have the whole process of the learning of music be an enjoyment. “

A few days before, the music educators heard a similar message from Dr. Frank R. Wilson, a neurologist who wrote the just published “Tone Deaf and All Thumbs? An Invitation to Music-Making for Late Bloomers and Non-Prodigies” (Viking).

Wilson, an assistant clinical professor of neurology at UC San Francisco Medical Center, told the audience he got into music as a byproduct of parenthood. He said that he began exploring the relationship between music and neurology after he could not understand how his young pianist daughter “could make her fingers go so fast.”

“I thought that as a neurologist, I might have some idea about that,” he recalled, adding that he was also more than a little jealous of both his daughter’s and his son’s musical gifts.

As he pondered his children’s musical accomplishments, Wilson said, he began to consider new possibilities for himself. Opportunities such as taking up the piano about seven years ago at age 40--despite the fact that after studying piano for only three months in junior high he had been persuaded to drop it in favor of the bass drum.

“I thought, since the whole brain is involved in music making and I have a whole brain, why not me? I looked at the elegance of human machinery and came to the conclusion that I couldn’t fail.”

Or as he puts it in the book, “I am convinced that all of us have a biologic guarantee of musicianship.”

Now, by musicianship, Wilson is not implying that every person who takes up the recorder has the potential to draw fawning crowds at Carnegie Hall. In fact, he told the crowd at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel that obsession with making music at a high professional level may actually squelch students’ natural enthusiasm and ability to perform.

Wilson wants the world to remember that anybody can learn to make and enjoy music. Anybody. At any age. “You can start in the womb with marimba familiarization training,” he writes, “and have yourself carted into a nursing home at age 97 with bells lashed to the stretcher, hammering away at your favorite transcription of Beethoven’s 24th Piano Sonata.

Undeterred by Disability

” . . . We all have music inside us and can learn to get it out one way or another. This is true regardless of our age, formal experience with music, or the size and shape of our fingers, lips or ears. So many musicians are undeterred by blindness, hearing impairment and strokes that not even physical disability seems much of a barrier.”

Why is he so convinced that human beings innately have the ability to perform musically?

Wilson, a Walnut Creek resident who serves on the board of directors of the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, is both impressed and mystified by the human brain. It’s an organ he described as “the only non-linear computer that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”

On a more serious note, he observed that only a small portion of the brain is devoted to controlling the large muscles while a far larger area of the brain is assigned to the smallest muscles of the body, “namely the muscles of the hands and arms and also the muscles of the face and the mouth--these muscles are the muscles used by musicians whether they’re vocalizing or or playing an instrument.

“When you look at the amount of brain it requires to run the large muscles and then the much larger amount the brain requires to control the small muscles, you can see that the human brain is the brain of an animal that has developed a special skill for control of muscles used to make music.”

Beyond this relatively large chunk of the brain just waiting to be taught to control music-making muscles, Wilson said that humans are also blessed with an exquisite auditory feedback system, a system that allows them to refine the movements of those music-making muscles.

However, as he reminded the music educators, the paradox is that humans come equipped with all this potential for making and enjoying music, but relatively few bother to do so because of inevitable comparisons with professionals. “Because we’re so enraptured with virtuosity and the extraordinary musical ability of some performers, we exclude ourselves (from making any music) unless we’re in that category.”

On top of this, Wilson has found students may routinely be branded “unmusical” when, in fact, the student is just discouraged and probably hasn’t spent enough time “programming his cerebellum for automatic movement.”

But there is a catch. No free rhythm-and-blues lunch. Even Wilson admitted that programming the cerebellum takes time, patience and a lot of work. And in his quest to understand the relationship between the brain and music, he eventually concluded that work is the simple reason why his daughter can make her fingers go so fast.

As he explained, “All it takes is work; complex skill and absolute reliability demand more time and and greater concentration during the learning process, but the potential for improvement is still a property of the (brain’s) wiring.”

In other words, “Virtuosity is no big deal, if you don’t mind practicing.”