Posts tagged books

Barry Green with W Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Music, Pan Books, 1987.

Not a book review, but some quick notes about the book.

The book is based on Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. That one developed the idea that in playing tennis you are playing two games: the external one against your opponent, and the another against your own inner obstacles to playing well. The Inner Game of Music takes the same ideas and applies them instead to musical performance.

Key idea:

• performance = potential minus interference

where potential represents what you’re actually capable of and interference consists largely of your own inner distractions. For example

• doubting your ability
• fear of losing control
• feeling you’ve not practised enough
• being concerned you won’t see or hear properly
• worrying about the accompanist
• thinking the instrument/equipment might malfunction
• worrying about losing your place in the music
• doubting that the audience will like your playing
• fear that you might forget music which actually you’ve thoroughly memorised
• fear that even if it goes well, your parents will still be disappointed that you chose to do music instead of the job they had in mind for you

(These are all distractions which professional musicians identified themselves as suffering from.) Any attention which you’re giving to the distractions isn’t being given to the music, and so detracts from the performance.

The book considers you as having two sides which are referred to as Self 1 and Self 2.

• Self 1 is analytical and offers ”instructions, warnings and general play-by play commentary” as you perform. The contention is that even if these are valid (for example, technical advice), giving attention to them while playing stops you from giving attention to the music.
• Self 2 already knows how to play, learns intuitively, has lots of assimilated knowledge, and is “unthinking but aware”.

An example from my own experience: if you’ve thoroughly practised the notes of a difficult passage, so that they’re “programmed” into your fingers and you can instinctively play them, then there’s no need when playing to think about what note to play next. If you do, you’re liable to stumble, because thinking about them gets in the way of letting your fingers get on with it. So in this instance, your fingers are part of Self 2.

The book presents a variety of techniques for enabling Self 2 to get on with playing the music without interference from Self 1, often by switching attention from Self 1’s chatter to some aspect of the music or by doing something counterintuitive. One example given is of playing an awkward leap on an instrument. You’ve practised it, and you can do it, but you still worry that you can’t. His suggested cure is to play the leap and try to get it wrong—-thereby (i) making yourself focus on listening to what’s happening instead of on worrying about it and (ii) discovering that, in fact, you can trust your fingers to get it right.

I’d say the basic aim of the book is to allow you to trust and use your instinctive abilities. Conscious learning is still required in order to acquire many of those abilities in the first place (though in some places the book talks as though it isn’t), but once they’ve become instinctive, they should be allowed to flourish. Once things happen unconsciously, there’s no need for conscious interference with them.