Learning Something Old and New

At the Amherst Early Music Festival, we gather to engage with music from Renaissance and Baroque periods. Some instruments are eccentric, with strange names like sackbut or cornamuse. Many of us are equally as quirky.

This year I started learning how to play music directly from the hand written or printed notation that was used 500 years ago. As the sample shows, it is only slightly similar to what is currently used, and many of the modern conventions had not been established until later in history.

It is fascinating to make music reading the same images on paper used by musicians more than a dozen generations ago. As one teacher said after practicing a five-part piece over an hour, “I wonder if this is the first time anyone has heard this music in the last 500 years!” That is pretty heady stuff. But my head could also get in the way.

Learning anything entirely new, especially as an adult, takes one back to feeling like a child. Playing from early musical notation led to feelings of ineptness, stupidity and embarrassment, and was deeply humbling. I have had to let go of deeply trained and ingrained habits, and needed to re-learn what to expect from the paper with black ink in front of me.

Those with more experience told me the ways that they adjusted, but all emphasized the importance of relying on my sense of musicality instead of specific rules or techniques. I needed to find a way to trust what I know about music, and to keep my analytical mind out of the way. Trying to process it intellectually while sight reading is impossible.

It is like learning a new language as an adult. You can learn the various verb tenses and memorize definitions of new words. But when speaking to someone, you cannot pause for several seconds to mentally flip through the dictionary in your head. It needs to become much more intuitive and automatic.

It is hard to let go of the sense of control that one’s intellect provides. There were times when the panic would set in, when I felt so overwhelmed there seemed no point in going on. My brain could not process all of what it needed to do any faster, and I would sink into despair.

I tried to monitor myself for those times and then intentionally let go of my anxiety, taking a few deep breaths and put down my instrument. If I could just listen to those playing around me, read the notes and let myself begin to hear the music again, I would settle down. I had to get out of my head and listen with the rest of who I am.

Taking the time to listen to those around me and how they would play a passage a particular way, I began to understand how the rules fit into the music. Each class I would have at least one “Aha” moment in which I saw the why a rule was needed, and the role it played. By discovering those patterns and learning how to recognize them in the process of making the music, I understood it better and was able to apply it more easily n the future.

Eventually, I could pick up my instrument and try again, a bit humbler though more confident that I was understanding the music at a much deeper level.

Curiously, much of what I have described here I have been learning on my spiritual journey. I have worked on the problem of getting stuck in my head. I have learned that I need to find time to withdraw and relax my view of things. I have begun to trust in the knowledge that there is a deeper level which will understand things.