"Uncommon Measure"

Natalie Hodges's meditation on music making is uncommonly accessible, because she writes as someone who worked very hard but ultimately gave up on striving to become a professional musician.

• * This phenomenon—which continues to pose a foundational challenge to philosophers—seems intuitively true from a human and literary perspective. Writing the book of linear time changes our reading of the past—if not the events themselves, then at least their meaning, our sense of how they happened and why. The stories that make up a single lifetime are perpetually mixed up and mixed together; our subconscious minds are constantly at work rewriting time in the margins of our memories, coaxing narrative out of chronology, temporal order out of time’s chaos. In the act of recording, writing, remembering, we chart our stories onto a particular path—one way, perhaps, that from our limited human perspective we can come to terms with the infinity of past paths not taken. Writing thus distorts our sense of our own time, but it also orients us in it and helps us give it meaning. <> I set out to write an exploration of music and its relation to the science of time. Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.
• And writing about music has reminded me, too, of how much I love the violin. If all is truly said and done, if there is to be no more playing and the rest really is silence, why, then, does the past insist on returning in theme and aching variation, offering itself for memory and reinterpretation? I think of what the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli posits in his 2017 book, The Order of Time: that “the mystery of time is ultimately, perhaps, more about ourselves than about the cosmos.” What we all want, I suppose, is freedom from time—or at least the freedom to shape our own time at will, to change the meaning of the past from the perspective of a future present.

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• * This was the only thing I could be sure of, going into that performance: where and when I was going to have my big botch. I’d spend the first part of the piece waiting for it, and the rest cursing myself for it. <> I suppose this fixation functioned as a kind of subconscious talisman, albeit a perverse one. Perhaps if I focused hard enough on that spot and sacrificed it for the greater good of the whole piece... Rather, in some subliminal way that I can’t quite understand, I needed to mess them up.
• “La Campanella,” or “The Little Bell,” so named for its thematic motive of ringing, dinging high-pitched harmonics, silvery metallic tones created by stopping the string with one finger and touching it lightly with another. The piece is by Niccolò Paganini, considered by music historians to have been the first true violin virtuoso... Trying to play his compositions, especially under pressure, is reminiscent of the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho—high-pitched shrieking sounds and all—where your ego is Janet Leigh and the ghost of Paganini is the shadowy figure with the knife.
• I am still stricken by the memory, sick and visceral, of how it felt when time stopped. Why is it that one’s sense of time, so supple inside the music itself, seizes up and cracks beneath an audience’s expectant gaze (or as soon as one becomes aware of that gaze, that expectation)? Why does getting into the flow of the music require yielding yourself to its time, feeling its flow through and around you, when all the while time is also the enemy, the thing you’re running out of as you play along, trying to make it to the end and yet trying to make something of the moment while the music lasts?
• Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events. Rhythm is at the heart of that arrangement, on every scale:
• There’s a term for that interplay of stretch and compression: rubato, literally the “robbing of time.” The malleability of our perception of time is the stuff of music itself. The concept of passage, the way we generally conceptualize time—seconds elapse into minutes, today becomes tomorrow—is of getting through from one thing to another. In music, time is inseparable from sound itself. A piece of music is a multidimensional entity, a creation molded from time’s clay.
• * our uncanny predictive sense of when the next beat will fall, of what the next chord could be. But what is that sense, exactly? Turns out there’s a word for it, and neurological research behind it: entrainment, the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat,
• But once those first preliminary signals are received, the motor cortex starts firing back its own electrical impulses, helping the auditory regions refine their own predictive sense of when the next beat will fall and creating an ongoing loop of action potentials. In other words, our motor coordination affects our ability to keep in time as much as our sense of time affects our motor coordination. Rhythm engenders movement, and movement in turn becomes rhythm.
• * Knowing what’s to come—and, more importantly, feeling secure in that knowledge—allows you to let go and focus intensely on communicating, on keeping the piece’s time and yet making its expression feel spontaneous. But when all you can fixate on is your weird psychotic certainty that you’re going to mess up, no matter how well you’ve prepared—that obliterates your sense of being in time. That dread weighs everything else down, so all the parts that might have redeemed the mess-up are wasted.
• If the motor system is responsible for entrainment, and performance anxiety messes with the motor system, then shouldn’t performance anxiety inhibit entrainment also? According to Patel, yes, it’s possible.
• Patel posits that the heightened connections between the brain’s auditory and premotor regions evolved partly because they facilitated vocal learning and speech in early humans... Speech—which, like music, connects sounds in time to express emotion and create meaning—has its own performed element, predictive yet improvisatory: You think as you speak, your words have to keep up with your thoughts in time. It’s a stunning capability, automatic and instinctive and miraculous. And yet it can shut down the instant you start thinking too hard about the act of speaking itself.
• * It’s as though my mind has to toggle between two time signatures, that of my ego and that of the music. The two run along fundamentally different grains, like cross-rhythms, where triple meter fights against double. One is a self-absorbed, interior time—the time of thought and of self-consciousness, of the individual mind navigating its way through the world—while the other contains the possibility for a kind of communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others. The music wants to flow, but my ego wants to stop all the clocks: As much as it demands to be the center of attention, it flies into a panic at the thought of everyone looking at it, a frightened demon-child that doesn’t know what it wants yet clamors to have its way... Performance embodies the paradox of losing yourself and yet asserting yourself, the way an actor takes the stage in order to become someone else entirely
• Bach’s Sonata in C Major for solo violin, which she and I worked on, off and on, for pretty much the entire time I had been her student. The second movement is a devilishly tricky fugue, a labyrinth of repeated micro-themes that pursue one another in a seemingly endless four-voice canon, a microscopic rondo in every measure.
• What I did experience that night, however, was the feeling of being acutely in body and in time. I took all of Ying’s psychedelic Pilates hocus-pocus and believed in it as mightily as I could. This was the last time I would get to play for her, and I didn’t want to lose any moment of it to the blinding force of fear. I grounded my feet on the floor, pretended she was the only one in the audience, focused all my energy toward her, and played for her alone. I didn’t need to worry about what she was thinking; I knew she wouldn’t judge, no matter what happened; I just wanted to tell her, to show her, in some way, what being her student had meant to me.

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• But then new lines began to split off from the main body of the theme, like the branches of a tree; strange harmonies suddenly flowered forth; the time signature shifted from a bright two-step to a shadowy waltz, like leaves turning in the light.
• It is the responsibility of musicians to keep that past alive, through performances that inevitably become acts of memorialization. Thus not only the music itself, but the traditions of how to play it, are passed down and down again through the fires of time until they have been forged and polished into a ring of gold, a goliath and immovable canon.
• * It is those alterations, in fact, that constitute the high paradox of the standard of “good” classical music, and perhaps a bit of its hypocrisy. Even within the closed system of the canon, one quality strongly desired both in performer and performance is a sense of freedom—a sustained feeling of unencumbered expression, a communicable sense that your instrument is at your command as you traverse the depths and lightness of its sound... Perhaps improvisation and intensive practice, then, can be interpreted as opposite expressions of the same desire. Both seek freedom within the parameters of style and the relative constraints of form: one through preparation to the point of near oblivion, the other through a momentary oblivion that transcends any need for preparation.
• One of the lead authors, Charles Limb, has found in previous studies that improvisation strongly correlates with deactivations in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with self-awareness and, importantly, self-censorship and inhibition.
• * The difference between memorized performance and improvisation, it turns out, lies in an aspect of the brain called the default-mode network (DMN), a sprawling system of functional connectivity between regions of the brain that, loosely put, modulates the many facets of the self. These include, to name a few, the medial prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making, self-perception, and autobiographical memory; the hippocampus, which forms new memories; the angular gyrus, a center of perception and spatial cognition, a sense of oneself in the physical world; and the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, responsible for thoughts about others and their relation to the self... If the regions of the DMN, working together, represent a unified sense of self, upon which Montero draws when she is playing music she has learned in the past, the act of improvisation somehow disbands that cohesion, requires her to draw on something else.
• Thus Montero’s improvisations retain the shadow of things she has learned or heard or played in the past, the patterns of cadence and form imprinted on a mind constantly consumed by music. These include patterns not only of remembered auditory sequences, such as scales and arpeggios and chord progressions, but of motion internalized by her hands themselves, the motor network of her fingers “using learned patterns to create new patterns” in what the study authors call “a form of embodied creativity.” Limb, who uses the term embodied cognition, explained to me that this is likely not the work of “a single part of the brain at all,
• * Montero’s, then, is a transcendent kind of muscle memory—not one to which her musicality is bound, but, rather, which she bends to her whim and will, memory that opens up an infinity of possibilities in the present. Reading the study results reminded me of Saint Augustine’s idea of memoria, put forth in Book X of his Confessions: that some things must have been there in his memory “even before I learnt them,” but “remote and pushed into the background, as if in most secret caverns”; and that it is “by thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected.” Improvisation, then, can be seen as an uncanny manifestation of deep memory itself: the creation of order out of disorder, a deep up-pouring from some dormant part of the soul; a confirmation that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows.”
• That idea of an instantaneous, prescient memory—of remembering the future, as it were—has a strange, surprising corollary in the natural world, in the universe’s order of things. It’s called the path integral, and it occurs in the realm of quantum mechanics: the sphere of the uncertain and statistical, with its tensions and overlappings between the finite and infinite, form and void.
• The principle of least action manifests itself in her improvisations, then, not in that she plays what’s easiest; rather, that she plays what occurs to her to play, what comes as she lets herself drift along with time. She doesn’t think or resist; she just does, leaning into the predestiny of form.
• Hawking argued that the very formation of human memory inevitably increases the entropy of the universe: that the energy required to align the neurons in charge of creating and storing memories, which is used up and dissipated as heat, will always exceed the minute gain in order represented by the creation of an individual memory itself. Thus the direction in which we remember our lives is the direction in which entropy increases;
• the canon of precomposed classical music, whose very existence seems constructed to defy entropy, to enclose time and seal it off so that it cannot trickle linearly away, to ensure that we remember. As a written score opens up possibilities of structure and complexity—the capacity for a piece of music to contain a higher level of disorder—so, too, has classical music, as a canon and a practice, been designed to ward off the entropic force of time as more and more music is written, as the world’s disorder increases, as time itself moves onward.
• * found increases in brain entropy overall when classical performers improvised rather than played from a score.* ) The drug of improvisation, like drugs of altered consciousness, seems to open up associative pathways along which the self is given permission to disintegrate, to give in to the pull of disorder and its accompanying freedoms.
• That’s what I hear when Montero plays, anyway: the simultaneity of time embodied by the path integral, whereby a particle traverses freely the terrain of past, present, future, and renders those boundaries meaningless. Thus improvisation, or at least Montero’s improvisations, may serve as a metaphor for time in the quantum universe, where reality and possibility exist simultaneously and where past, present, and future are one—even though on the level of concrete, lived experience time seems to slip away, to vanish, without the possibility of return.

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• This, then, is the immigrant credo: to be able to give your children what you did not have yourself. All four of us have played since we were about five,
• Many of them were Asian, or half Asian like us; and, like us, if they were halfies, it was almost always their Asian parent who accompanied them.
• * She gives, I take: that has always been the imbalanced equation of our relationship, its asymmetry and equilibrium. The year in which this story begins and ends, the year I was seventeen, I was caught up in a rage of becoming: a nightly routine of practicing violin until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M.
• * I love her, and in loving her I define her as my mother, the woman who has devoted her life to my siblings and me. As I get older, it seems to me that trying to learn how to love somebody the right way—to give enough of yourself, but never too much—is to discover the frightening asymmetry at the heart of love. Like a kaleidoscope that, twisted relentlessly in the hands of a child, establishes a crystalline moment of symmetry only to be broken again, changed to something new, the work of love lays bare the infirmity of the divide between past and future, self and other, you and me.
• My mother is Korean, but by then the book’s central term, Tiger Mother, had already made its way into common parlance, swallowing up every mom who looked like mine: an Asian woman who raises her children to excel in academics and classical music, essentially by forcing them to practice well and study hard.
• * For Asian parents in America, the “fear of failure, fear of disappointment” is doubly fraught. For the price of being labeled a “Tiger Mother,” they can remain faithful to Eastern philosophies of parenting and fulfill what they deem to be their basic responsibilities to their children—or they can adopt a more laissez-faire Western approach in the name of assimilation, and in doing so cut ties with their cultural past... Thus the urgency of raising successful children becomes even more exacerbated and more complicated for the Asian mother in America, and for her child. Fail to make the most of your opportunity, and all your family’s sacrifice was for naught; bang your head against the wall and seize that chance with all your strength, and even though you’ll add your own nameless face to the swelling flesh of the stereotype you’ll at least have found some way to survive, if never to belong. <> Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Asian parent/classical music stereotype, an image that is fraught because it is largely true.
• New Englanders who moved in endless easy circles from St. Paul’s to Harvard to Martha’s Vineyard and then back again, buoyed by their confidence in that mysterious and intangible birthright. His parents, a private wealth manager and an heiress from Essex, Massachusetts, had been shocked, to say the least, when their son married “an Oriental.” I imagine my mother moving through the velvet crowd on Dad’s arm, the empty, lofty faces greeting his and barely registering hers.
• How, then, am I to tell whoever asks this question that this wasn’t the case—that all of this didn’t make her a Tiger Mother, that what cancels out the stereotype is that she has loved classical music all her life, that she has known its great beauty and wanted us to know it, too—when I cannot separate this answer from the fact that when you’re an Asian person growing up in America, your choice to play and to love the violin is reduced, almost automatically, to the stereotype it is?
• And yet can I deny that in defending her, I am really being defensive about myself and all the ways I prevailed upon her, took advantage of her sacrifice and was grateful, even happy, that she’d made it? When I tried miserably, haltingly, to tell her this, to get those feelings off my chest the year I woke her up almost every night to practice with me, she just smiled and shook her head and told me not to worry, that her job is to “launch the four of you
• a concerto by Sibelius, and it’s killing me. Parts of the score seem to me borderline unplayable, particularly the thunderous passage of double octaves at the end of the first movement, a long slide down the strings like a guttural wailing. Even the opening, which we are working on now—a single-voiced melody spinning out over a hollow and wind-picked landscape—is difficult to pin down. Practicing this piece, for this particular purpose, feels to me like a fight against invisible forces within the labyrinth of the self, against whose edges I risk bumping up unexpectedly in the dark, the boundaries of who I am and what I am capable of.

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• Like the devils [that were once believed] to inhabit humans, the [Bach] Chaconne must be cast out of the body before the accursed can be considered purified. That, however, is just what does not happen. The Chaconne remains buried within the violinist, a torment and a challenge as long as he can tuck a fiddle under his chin. —Irving Kolodin,
• I want to begin the way the Chaconne is supposed to begin: grave, momentous, sure of itself and of its sorrow, that first D minor chord rending the solemn silence and yet consecrating something new, setting in motion the iterative, underlying theme that carries you toward the last bar in a kind of canon, drawing from within itself a cry that is at once savage and sacred, end and beginning.
• The camp consisted of a collection of dilapidated cabins at the top of a hill, alongside which ran a little dirt road that kept on for miles. You got shut inside your cabin for five hours a day—the counselors would keep vigil in the hall, walking around to each door and knocking if they heard you stop for too long—and you practiced the bejesus out of whatever you had been assigned.
• * At Meadowmount, the very best students got to perform for the entire camp on Wednesday nights. The rest of us would get dressed up—there was a business-formal dress code just for sitting in the audience—and watch them make Paganini caprices look as easy as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
• Still, I knew deep down that it would never be enough. All the practicing—the mind-numbing repetitions, the bloody fingernails, the brutally late nights—was either a way of convincing myself it would all be worth it or punishing myself for the fact that it wouldn’t, I’m not sure which. <> It was only after my father left, four years after that summer, that I suddenly wanted to let go, or finally felt like I could.
• including for overstaying a leave by three months, dueling with a church bassoonist who set upon him with a walking stick after Bach insulted his performance, and inviting a “strange maiden” to “make music” in the church’s organ loft. No, Bach’s music is self-effacing because it contains so little trace of him.
• Likewise, memory—that most universal and yet individual of temporal structures—lends form and shape to experience in biographical time. We inhabit simultaneous, concentric timescales: the time line of the past coiled within the immediacy of the present moment unfolding. Memory creates a metonymic congruence between them, melding past with present in such a way that our former selves move forward with us in time. But grief ruptures that momentum. The dam breaks; those currents converge into an eddy of memory, desire, and regret, an almost inescapable, endless circling back into what once was, what has been. This is what Bach understood, and made manifest in the Chaconne—all the gravitational aspects of grief, which you experience perpetually in cycle and flashback and variation. But in a sudden instant you can remember everything again; the past comes alive, and an entire chaconne is unleashed within the emotional arrest of that moment, a spiral of related memories and buried feeling. In this way, the Chaconne—enclosed by the same thought, the same phrase that is both end and beginning, that feeling of loss that sends you spiraling down the wormhole of memory only to arrive at itself—enacts the way memory can expand a moment in time.
• In the middle of the Chaconne, there is a pause that lasts for less than the space of a breath and yet, somehow, for an eternity. The roiling purple darkness of D minor dissipates, and out of the silence begins a single D major chord, barely a touch to the strings, a breath of bright wind... The section is one long crescendo toward ecstasy, full of open strings, where you don’t put any fingers down and just bow, letting the strings ring out in their full and elemental clarity. Violinistically, it’s a delight to play: The open strings set your entire violin trembling, so that you can feel the wood itself ringing against your neck and shoulder as you bow.
• Bach adds another iterated element, a trinity of repeated notes—either A or D—that sound like the striking of a bell. They create a kind of ellipse between the end of each phrase and the beginning of the next, linking and extending them into one continuous moment; they are alpha and omega, beginning and end, and their persistent chiming announces, over and over again, the present moment. To play them you have to traverse the open strings of the violin, from high to low, sounding the depths of the instrument and the moment. The repeated notes begin small and sweet and then increase in their resonance and warmth, until the notes are ringing out with a joy that defies all containment, a bright effusion, a shout from the mountaintops.
• I’d forgotten the beauty of the D major section, the way everything sounds present, everything feels alive. It’s the one moment of respite from memory in the entire piece, the way you can be taken out of grief, even momentarily, by something beautiful: the sight of a green hill after rain, the blue light from a stained-glass window, the voice of a violin. Maybe this is where I can start, how I can find my way back in: not by going back to the beginning, to beat my head against the familiar discouragement and despair, but to the hope for some kind of grace as I cycle back in the perpetual chaconne of memory, a negotiation and reconciliation leading to some moments when just playing itself will be enough.

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• theory, posited by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind in 2013, is that entangled particles are connected by wormholes, theoretical shortcuts through space-time that bridge one point directly with another. Under general relativity, it is possible for two black holes, distant from one another in space-time, to be linked directly by a wormhole, a tunnel connecting their interiors. Maldacena and Susskind propose that this wormhole is, in fact, equivalent to the entanglement of the two black holes.
• you can’t escape the feeling that there must exist some kind of instantaneous, unconscious connection between improvising partners.
• As such, there is no accepting out of guilt or pity or awkwardness; indeed, la mirada y cabeceo is accepted only if there happens to be some attraction already pulling you together. Tango itself begins, then, with something as momentary and fateful as attraction, as coincidental and yet certain as chemistry. The dance itself is as much a product of that connection as the connection is of the dance. <> Thomas attributes that intimacy to the fundamental sadness that lies at the heart of all tango, “one of the few Latin dances that is predominantly not happy.” Its “dominant emotion is nostalgia, a sense of loss,” of a past that continually haunts the present... minor-major-minor: happy memories enclosing, or enclosed by, a sad present.
• so, too, is there is an improvisatory element to every performance of composed music, not of the notes but of the sound. This is especially true of ensemble performances, which require the wordless, spontaneous coordination of fingers and bows—creating a shared interpretation of each phrase, or even each note, in a given moment among all the players.
• blues saxophonist David Lenson described: an ineffable mode of consciousness that musicians call “the ESP.” This is the ability to know a split second in advance what the other members of the band are going to do... Each member of the improvising group has to inhabit that baseline of musical consciousness which constitutes knowledge of a form, a template on which to give the music shape and direction in time. From there, each musician is responsible for creating the music in time, for unspooling the phrases from the cosmic silence that lies before them. Lenson, quoting Coleridge, described improvisation as “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”
• * Instead, improvisation is like going over a waterfall again and again; there’s a void opening up before every moment, and you plunge over the edge and yet somehow never fall, never reach the other side, even as you hurl yourself over again and again; and when you look back you’ve created a river, the very current you’ve been sailing down. Like the particles that instantaneously sync their polarities, to improvise with someone else is to pinpoint a moment of intersection in time, between past and future, you and me—to seize life and hold it still. Each moment melts like an individual snowflake and yet is replaced, simultaneously, by another which is wholly different and equally beautiful, so that you inhabit a present that is continuous and yet made up of individual moments falling and faintly falling, the drifted accumulation of the past.*
• this is the kind of partner I love to have, when their musicality is so profound that it changes the way you hear the music, and it changes the way you experience the music.” To improvise with others, then, is to experience something more than the infinite subjectivity of time: It is to know that those individual subjectivities can be unified... In short, it’s entanglement: the certainty of simultaneity, the eternal act of creation in the infinite we are.
• Perhaps this, too, is the sadness of tango: the proximity of beating hearts ticking out their own private time. It reminded me of how once when I was little, watching a movie with my dad, I laid my head on his chest only to be terrified by the soft thudding of his heart, how its very continuity seemed a kind of countdown toward something finite and inevitable.
• with a partner who made me move and moved with me. I hadn’t known what I was doing, and yet I had: feeling the energy of her torso, the lightness of her arms, the sureness of her feet from impulse to impulse, that miraculous synergy which requires both a certainty and a forgetting when, enlivened by that spontaneous connection to another human being, the body takes over the mind.
• We were bound to each other, yet I felt in that very binding a kind of freedom, because I could do whatever I wanted and knew he would be with me, and that whatever he did, I, too, would be with him. That freedom astonished me and made me shudder. It seemed that inside the very music we were dancing, two leaping particles in a world of our own. Or, perhaps, that our entanglement was the music, the sound waves the reverberation of our synchronized fields of energy.
• This is also what makes writing frightening, at least to my mind: the fact that it can change the past so effortlessly, and solidify that change into reality. And yet I tell myself, too, that part of the marvel of living must surely be in our struggle to understand our lives both as we narrate them through memory and as they really are; and that in doing so we might perhaps get closer to knowing the beginning and the end of time.