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THE EIGHTH PRACTICE

Giving Way to Passion

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility?

— SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Either/Or

ALL AROUND US is vibrancy and energy. The universe is sparking with generative power. But how do we tap into the source—where can we find an electric socket for vitality? Do we have to pump up the energy on our own to carry out the day, or can we catch the current of another wellspring beyond ourselves?

Suppose for a moment that vital, expressive energy flows everywhere, that it is the medium for the existence of life, and that any block to participating in that vitality lies within ourselves. Of course, our consciousness tells us a different story. The world comes to us sorted into parts: people are distinct entities, shapes have edges, and apples and oranges cannot be compared. Rarely do we come upon or experience this integrative energy, and sometimes only serendipitously, like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. This kind of vibrancy may take us by surprise when we find ourselves committing to doing something extraordinary or when we meet each other on a most personal, elemental level. Yet our minds and bodies are perfectly capable of actively surrendering our boundaries and suspending an edge once we know how and where the lines are drawn.

The practice of this chapter, giving way to passion, has two steps:

1. The first step is to notice where you are holding back, and let go. Release those barriers of self that keep you separate and in control, and let the vital energy of passion surge through you, connecting you to all beyond.

2. The second step is to participate wholly. Allow yourself to be a channel to shape the stream of passion into a new expression for the world.

The order and predictability that civilization strives for supports us to get on with the things that matter to us, like starting companies, guiding our children, studying the stars, or composing symphonies. Yet, because the straight-edged organization of our cities and towns—as well as many aspects of our daily lives—tends to mirror our perceptual maps, urban life may magnify the boundaries that keep us in a state of separateness. Places in the wild draw many of us to experience a vitality greater than our own, but it may take an act of surrender to let the gates give way between ourselves and nature.

A LEAP

ROZ: It was late March, and the landscape of northern New England was in a dramatic frame of mind. Skies and mountain lowered in black and white, while dark river water shouldered up under the ice cover. Spring was cracking open and making no bones about it. I walked across a swaying suspension bridge over a formidable section of river, and climbed down the bank on the other side to a focal point of activity. There I faced the scene of an ongoing accident. Titanic triangles of green ice stood straight in the air, as the raving waters split the frozen surface, piling jagged ice sections one upon another. The river roared like mad, its waters roiling by with incessant energy. The abandon was outrageous, confrontational. I could barely hear myself think.

I wavered. It was impossible to be there and resist for long. To preserve myself from this nerve-wracking force, ringing so loudly in my ears, I could have turned away and climbed back up to the thoroughfare, where a roadside diner waited only yards ahead. I could have found a comfortable distance. Yet standing stationary on the bank, utterly still, I took an existential leap. “Let its force run through me,” I allowed, not having moved an inch. “Let it turn all my molecules in its direction; trust it and surrender. Let it give me what it has to offer.” And it did, and it has ever since; wherever I seek life’s passion, the river is there churning through me. I can hear its mind-numbing rush, the movements of billions of atoms. I see how the ice leapt out of its way, flinging itself upward in sea-colored icons to glory.

Many months later, on a dazzling summer day off New England’s coast, I oddly found myself exclaiming, “What is nature asking for?”—not knowing how to cope with so much beauty. I had set off by canoe into secluded coves of dark green waters, where roots of spruce clung to the cliffs’ edges with their elbows, grass stems quivered brilliant in the sunshine, and birds darted out over the water. My question, springing from a naive part of me, surprisingly brought forth an answer—“Nature is asking you to feel watery, rock heavy, to reach out with pine branch and leaf. It is calling you to feel the skimming of the water. Participate!” When I began to paint later that day, I found that it was the momentum of nature that showed up on the canvas; not the object, the lines or the color, but dynamic forces, geometric vibrancy, the passion of color.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

— MARTHA GRAHAM, quoted by Agnes DeMille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham LONG LINES

Like the person who forgets he is related to the waves in the sea or loses continuity with the movement of wind through grass, so does the performer lose his connection to the long line of the music when his attention rests solely on perfecting individual notes and harmonies. Like the person who, mindless that she has all of nature in her fingertips, blocks the expression of the life force, so does the musician interrupt the long line of passion when she limits her focus to the expression of personal emotion, local color, or harmonic events. Her narrow emphasis can produce a dull and numbing performance.

Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is an example of a piece whose meaning changes altogether when a pianist emphasizes the triplets in the right hand at the expense of the long melodic line in the bass, as so often occurs. The tempo slows down to match the interest in the individual somber notes in the right hand, and the character of the piece shifts from the light and forward-looking fantasy Beethoven intended, to a work rendered by tradition as one of deep nostalgia and regret.

Leon Fleischer, the renowned pianist and teacher, has said that playing a piece of music is an exercise in antigravity. The musician’s role is to draw the listener’s attention over the bar lines—which are but artificial divisions, having no relevance for the flow of the music—toward a realization of the piece as a whole. In order to make the connections between the larger sections of a piece, the player may find herself moving the tempo at a faster pace than if she were putting her attention on highlighting individual notes or vertical harmonies. This explains how it is that the metronome markings in the works of Beethoven and Schumann appear so fast, indeed too fast to many performers and scholars. These composers were passionate about launching a long line.

Life flows when we put our attention on the larger patterns of which we are a part, just as the music soars when a performer distinguishes the notes whose impulse carries the music’s structure from those that are purely decorative. Life takes on shape and meaning when a person is able to transcend the barriers of personal survival and become a unique conduit for its vital energy. So too the long line of the music is revealed when the performer connects the structural notes for the ear, like a bird buoyed on an updraft.

BEN: Many years ago, when I was at the conservatory in Florence studying harmony, we were taught to give an identifying rubric to every chord in the music, so that an analysis looked like the ground plan for an office full of separate cubicles. The teachers never suggested that there were any connections between one chord and another, so we remained cut off from the harmonic structure and the flow of the music. We could never get an aerial view of a piece. When one rises above a work to see the long line, the overarching structure, one can see and hear a new meaning, often far beyond the meaning viewed from the ground. And it is only when the essential shape of a musical work is revealed that its true passion can be fully experienced.

A student in my master class I teach at the Walnut Hill School, a preparatory school for the performing arts where I am the artistic director, captured this idea brilliantly on her “white sheet.” She had listened to one of her fellow students perform the first movement of Bach’s Suite no. 2 in D Minor for cello, expressively, but with little sense of the intrinsic shape of the piece. The playing seemed to wander aimlessly about, pausing here, emphasizing there, but without a clear notion of the underlying harmonic motion and melodic line.

After we had analyzed the structure, direction, and character of the piece in class, the cellist played again with a coherence and simple flow that had been lacking in her first performance. Here is what one listener, Amanda Burr, wrote spontaneously, in the few minutes allotted to the white sheets at the end of the class: Whenever I take my glasses off (usually they fall off), I panic. For one split moment, the grass becomes green fuzz, the sun, an overflowing cup of honey. There’s nothing ugly or aggressive about nature blurred. But I don’t know where I am. I can’t recognize friends. At any moment I could trip. That’s how I felt with Hanui’s playing—beauty glimmered all around me, but nothing was defined. I was helpless in a blur of color. The transformation Hanui underwent brought clarity, and with it, a more intricate, true beauty. The pristine architecture of Bach finally rose up to its aching glory.

ONE-BUTTOCK PLAYING

A young pianist was playing a Chopin prelude in my master class, and although we had worked right up to the edge of realizing an overarching concept of the piece, his performance remained earthbound. He understood it intellectually, he could have explained it to someone else, but he was unable to convey the emotional energy that is the true language of music. Then I noticed something that proved to be the key: His body was firmly centered in the upright position. I blurted out, “The trouble is you’re a two-buttock player!” I encouraged him to allow his whole body to flow sideways, urging him to catch the wave of the music with the shape of his own body, and suddenly the music took flight. Several in the audience gasped, feeling the emotional dart hit home, as a new distinction was born: the one-buttock player. The president of a corporation in Ohio, who was present as a witness, wrote to me: “I was so moved that I went home and transformed my whole company into a one-buttock company.” I never did find out what he meant by that, but I have my own ideas. The access to passion gives momentum to efforts to build a business plan, it gives a reason to set up working teams, it gives power to settling individual demands, and it gives urgency to communicating across sections of a company. My fantasy is that this CEO went back and spoke so passionately and so surely to the people in his organization that he straightaway hit the mark—the place of mind, body, and heart. I imagine that his people suddenly remembered why they were there, and what the company was founded for. And whenever a person gets bogged down or loses the track, I see that CEO leaning his body toward him, eloquently portraying the whole long soaring line of their future together.

I met Jacqueline Du Pre in the 1950s, when I was twenty and she was fifteen, a gawky English schoolgirl who blossomed into the greatest cellist of her generation. We performed the Two Cello Quintet of Schubert together, and I remember her playing was like a tidal wave of intensity and passion. When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl’s face, said, “I see you’ve just had your chance to play!” And Jackie answered, excitedly, “No, no, I’m just about to!” Even at six, Jackie was a conduit for music to pour through. She had the kind of radical confidence about her own highly personal expression that people acquire when they understand that performance is not about getting your act together, but about opening up to the energy of the audience and of the music, and letting it sing in your unique voice.

BTFI

A student from Spain, a member of my Wednesday Sonata and Lieder class at the New England Conservatory, asked me to coach him in preparation for an audition for the position of associate principal cellist of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. He played his pieces through with elegance and accuracy. It was playing of an absolutely professional standard, the kind of performance that would, I told him, gain him entry into the ranks of an orchestra. However, it lacked flair and the characteristics of true leadership — not only command of color, intensity, drive, and passion, but the energy to take people beyond where they would normally go. We started work on the pieces—I played the piano, sang, coaxed, and urged him on until his rather formal restraint broke down, and he began to play from the heart and throw all his passion and energy into the soaring passages of the Dvorak Concerto. In the middle of one of his most impassioned utterances, I stopped him and said, “There, that’s it. If you play that way, they won’t be able to resist you. You will be a compelling force behind which everyone will be inspired to play their best.” He wiped the sweat from his brow and from his cello, and we retired to the kitchen for a spaghetti dinner and a bottle of good red wine. As he left the house that night, I shouted behind him, “Remember, Marius, play it the second way!” “I will!” he called back.

Three weeks later he telephoned.

“How did it go, Marius?” I was eager to know.

“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t make it.”

“What happened?” I asked, as I prepared to console him.

He answered matter-of-factly, “I played the first way.”

“Never mind, Marius,” I said. “You will have other chances.” In my mind I vowed to work with him further on releasing his enormous capacity for expression. But it turned out that he had discovered how to break through the gates himself.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You haven’t heard the whole story. I was so peesed off, I said, ‘Fock it, I’m going to Madrid to play the audition for the principal cellist in the orchestra there!’—and I won it, at twice the salary of the other job.” “What happened?” I asked again, in amazement.

He laughed. “I played the second way!”

From then on we had another new distinction in the class, called Beyond the Fuck It, which fast became part of the folklore of all my classes, and showed up in the students as a spiritedness in going beyond where before they might have stopped. Several months after my visit to a Catholic girls’ school in California, I received a letter from the headmistress, informing me that BTFI had become their unofficial school motto.

Dear Mr. Zander,

I got my A because I am such a special and bright artist. A real artist of human life. The most precious treasure of whole my body is the endless passion of life.

Shu Fen

WE POSE the question again: “Where is the electric socket for possibility, the access to the energy of transformation?” It’s just there over the bar line, where the bird soars. We can join it by finding the tempo and lean our bodies to the music; dare to let go of the edges of ourselves … participate!