Thinking about thinking

The great drummer Jon Hiseman has just died. This post isn’t a tribute to him, but I was very sorry to hear of his passing. (Here’s an example of his playing, which is brilliant.) I did meet him once, doing a recording for someone in his studio. I forget the details around this as it was a long time ago, maybe early nineties. What really stayed with me is something that he said during a conversation in the studio. He remarked that the best music is played by people who are thinking about something else entirely, or words to that effect. What I believe he meant was that, when you are doing a gig, if you are having to think about the music in order to get it right, then there might be mistakes, or a feeling of uptightness about it perhaps. It’s when you know the music so well that you can play it while thinking about doing the laundry, or taking the car in for a service, or doing your accounts, that the music really sounds good, really flows. It was a remark that has stayed with me ever since. I actually think about it a lot. I think it disturbed me at the time as it seemed to imply some kind of disconnection, maybe something inauthentic about the performance. I feel differently about it now.

Seeing the news was a moment of synchronicity for me, because I’d just been thinking about this idea in relation to some clinical work. I found myself, in a session, thinking about something else, unrelated to the client or the music. This can feel transgressive. We’re supposed to be paying attention to the client, and to the music, to the ‘shared-musical space’, perhaps. I even wrote about Jon Hiseman in my process notes. Later, after writing this, I saw the news of his death.

This isn’t a post about synchronicity however, although you can have that one too if you like it. What it really got me thinking about was what I think about when I’m playing. I’ve have so many discussions with other musicians and music therapists about this. Some people have said that, when improvising, thought gets in the way. You need to be ‘in the zone’, where you’re not tripping yourself up with concerns about what ‘should’ be happening, where you can be ‘in flow’. The music flows along, and we stay with it, riding it like a wave, trusting the process. As soon as we think, ‘is this right?’ or ‘is this good?’ or ‘what shall we do next?’, we are getting in our own way. Mercédès Pavlicevic talked about the problem of thought in clinical improvisation in her podcast interview, expressing a similar idea. She said it might go something like, ‘Why am I in F sharp?’, and then the moment’s lost. She’ll be missed too, very much.

There may be a difference, of course, between the role of thinking in improvised or in tightly rehearsed music. Jon Hiseman may have been talking about the phenomenon of playing music that’s been well played-in, perhaps where a band is really gelling, some way into a tour. I’ve certainly experienced this. It doesn’t necessarily feel good to the performer. It can feel routine. But for the audience it might be a thrilling experience hearing a band playing really tightly together, giving the impression of total unity, where the individual musicians are just firing neurons within a complex whole that’s not perceived by any one of them as an entity, but by the listeners. You can listen to a recording of a gig you were on and feel like it was someone else playing, because the experience is so different to being part of the process of producing the sound.

While going through the motions might produce a tight performance, could the same be said for improvisation? Well, yes, I think it could. Kenny Werner talks a lot about this a lot in Effortless Mastery. When you let go and just let yourself play without trying to critique or edit, that’s when the best stuff happens. Thought gets in the way. Maybe there are differences between these two phenomena, maybe they are the same, maybe there are overlaps, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what concerned me when thinking about what happened in the session.

The question that came to my mind when thinking about my moment of drifting off, of thinking about something else, was, if I’m not thinking about the music, then what am I thinking about? I’m usually thinking about something. I’m not a yogi. This might be worth exploring. It may be that I need to work on my capacity to be in the here-and-now. Perhaps all music therapists should practise meditation in order to work on this, to enter a more thoughtless, mindful state. Probably not a bad idea. I don’t think it’s the answer though. I think the process of thinking, getting in the way of the music, being with the client some of the time, attuning, failing to attune, drifting off, playing good music or bad music, I think it’s all the process. The idea that we are attentive to the client, and that we are sharing in the musical process together, connecting in the music, is nonsense, or, at least, it’s not realistic. We are in some kind of music-making process with the client, and the two of us are failing to connect with each other in one way or another. We might be trying to connect, but we’re never going to make it, because our experiences will always be different. Even when the music comes together, it’s coming together in at least two different ways (I’m not going to even try to talk about group work). But this, I hope, is ok. I hope it is, because I’m never going to pay total attention to the client, not for a whole session. I’ll keep trying, but occasionally I’m going to drift off. I wish I hadn’t mentioned ‘doing your accounts’. What was I saying?