To Think or Not To Think

Almost all musicians, students and teachers alike, agree that music requires a balance of thinking and analysis with “feeling it” (that is, reacting and just simply letting things flow).  Both are essential components of being able to play music, yet depending on the situation, we may need to rely more heavily on one than the other.

How do you treat the balance of “thinking” and “feeling” in how you learn, improve, and perform music?  

Flutist and educator Ali Ryerson says that for her, the thinking process takes place in the practice room.  When playing with other musicians, music should be a conversation. She doesn’t want to cloud her mind with musical terms, analysis, or mental ‘roadmaps’ of what notes she plans to play next.  The practice room is where you should seize the opportunity to think about what options you have when improvising over, for example, a D minor chord. But the glue that holds all those thoughts together in a musical moment is the groove.  The time (groove, rhythm, etc) is much more important than the individual notes that you play.

Ali also emphasizes that when you’re playing with others, whatever the situation, you’re not in your own little bubble.  She would love for the word ‘accompanist’ to be abolished. After all, even if a piece is titled a ‘flute solo’ with piano accompaniment, both instruments are equal partners in the final outcome, and both should be listening to each other constantly.  (Flute players may want to note that Ali has an ongoing Jazz Flute Seminar this spring!)

This February Podcast “One Head, Two Brains” discusses the specialties of our two distinct brain hemispheres in relation to music.  The podcast cautions that the pop-psychology concepts of ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ are vastly oversimplified.  However, it is true that the two sides of the brain have different specializations. That division is true in nearly all animals with a neural system, not just humans.  The podcast explains “One of the hemispheres, the right, focuses on the big picture. The left focuses on details. Both are essential. If you can't see the big picture, you don't understand what you're doing. If you can't home in on the details, you can't accomplish the simplest tasks. This fundamental difference in orientation turns out to have profound consequences for everything the two hemispheres do.”  

In music, the left side of the brain helps you turn the notes on the page into movements of your hands (feet, breath, and whatever else you need to play your instrument).  The left brain assesses what parts of the music are not coming out as they should, so that we polish and improve our execution of a piece. The right side of the brain focuses on the overall sound and the end result that we want.  Without the right brain’s interpretation, “music” would just be a dull, endless stream of notes. We would sound like a 1980's MIDI keyboard, maybe perfectly in time, but void of emotion.

Similarly, the idea of “thinking” versus “feeling” in music recently came up in a discussion with flamenco colleagues. We are all foreigners to flamenco, having come from all over the world to study the art form.  We’ve all, at some point, been told by teachers (usually Spanish-born), that we need to “just feel it” and not think. But that is not always the most appropriate advice, especially as advice given from someone who has grown up in the flamenco world to a foreigner.  For example, one peculiarity of flamenco is that many styles use a rhythmic cycle of 12 beats. Even with extensive musical education in another style of music, 12 beats is not intuitive at first, because it doesn’t come up in many other genres. So it’s natural that foreigners would encounter more situations where we might need to count out a few cycles to make sense of a tricky rhythm.  I’ve been living in Spain for more than five years, and I need to take short recordings of challenging ideas in many rehearsals.

I do share Ali Ryerson’s approach in that I leave the analysis at home when I’m performing a solo guitar piece. I have thirteen years experience in classical guitar, and any solo I play in a show will be well-prepared.  But I can’t completely sit back and rely in my instincts when accompanying dance or singing, because, at least in flamenco, I’m still developing some fundamentals of those instincts. Another example of when thinking can be important is if a singer sings a melody I don’t recognize.  If I can at least think about the likely options for chords in that particular style and key, it can get me through a rough patch and safely back to familiar territory. For me, the right frame of mind for a performance is a delicate balance of being in the moment, yet being aware and conscious enough of what’s happening to be able to react quickly to unexpected ‘puzzles’ and complications.  

How do you approach the balance of “thinking” and “feeling” in your music?  Are you conscious of the different mindsets? Or can you strike an equilibrium without having to think about it as much?