I was with some friends the other day, including Ginny Richards, and she had just played the piano superbly well. We were discussing how it is that some people play the piano – or instrument or sing – so expressively, and others, who may be technically proficient, make it all sound so dead.
There is no easy answer, but my own focused on the space between the notes. Whether intuitively or not, the great instrumentalists play the notes but are more aware of the spaces between them. In fact these spaces frame the notes and are as important as the notes themselves; for it is in the contrast between a note sounding and its succeeding emptiness that the soul of the music resides.
Technically proficient performers tend to mechanise the notes and the spaces: they measure, precisely so, and thus no real feeling permeates the bridge between the sounds and its cessation. The expressive performers sense that note and its attendant silences – aching to speak through them indeed – are intimately connected; thus, in playing, they work to make the connection explicit.
Of course, this is also true in other disciplines. English poetry, for example, at its best and greatest, depends on rhythm and metre – the stressed syllable is framed by the unstressed ones, and in that contrast powerful emotions can be generated. And this is one reason why purely visual – or image-driven – poetry is less evocative. Certainly, the deliberate randomness of so much post-modern poetry completely fails to touch us at a deep level because there is no patterning of the sound effects, so the responses tend to be merely cerebral. In short people who like this stuff do so because it reflects their own view of the world, not because the poetry has entered the silence between the noise of words – and so driven to the surface the full force of the deep, chthonic gods of human emotion.
But perhaps most importantly of all is in the area of meditation which deploys the same principle. To wit, against the ‘something’ – the fullness – of life, the meditator enters the ‘nothing’ of meditation. As the Tao Te Ching puts it: ‘thirty spokes surround the hub: in their nothingness consists the carriage of effectiveness’. Breathing reflects this – the fullness of the breath in is followed by the emptiness of the breath out, but before the ‘out’ can happen there is a point of space, of turning, when the breath is neither in nor out, but suspended, as it were, on nothing.
When we meditate we deliberately try to empty our minds, and by doing so we return refreshed to the world of ‘things’. Further, it could be said that meditation on ‘nothing’ refreshes – cleanses – the doors of perception that have become so locked up for most of us.
I started by using words about playing the piano “superbly well” and singing so “expressively”, but really the one word, the most important word, that captures what happens when we pay attention to the spaces between the beats, the ‘nothings’ between the ‘somethings’, is the word ‘beauty’. We hear the beauty in the music and in the poetry; and arising from the meditation we see it – the beauty – in all that is natural, and sometimes even in what is not.
Thus, step by step, music, poetry, and meditation lead us eventually to the mystic realm where all is beautiful.
The Mapping Motivation Series 