>From one of my Cantorial students. The key here is practice and competence. Music is not an easy meditation. But it does do the things he says, if you do the work.
REH 'The pull of love' - or why music can be a quasi-spiritual practice Regularly playing an instrument takes you out of yourself and is deeply connected with love. It is a spiritual exercise for agnostics * Mark Vernon <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/markvernon> * guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> , Tuesday 14 December 2010 13.00 EST Piano playing 'If you do enough practice, you'll reach a moment when the motion of your fingers across the keyboard is itself a pleasure, regardless of the sound.' Photograph: Darla Winn/Getty In the first discussion in the Uncertain Minds series <http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2010/10/ 15/Uncertain-Minds%3A-what-can-an-agnostic-believe> , the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, spoke with Karen Armstrong, the historian of religion. It was an exchange that explored the nature of religious belief and practice, during which Rusbridger made what I thought was a striking confession. He plays the piano every day. He explained that he doesn't much go to church, though he was a chorister in his youth. He often enjoys speaking with religious people as their ethical concerns overlap with his values - notwithstanding the objectionable views some churches have towards women and gay people. He finds himself at Quaker meetings on occasion too, appreciating their agnostic and democratic spirit. But it was the piano-playing that struck me. Why should he offer regular piano-playing, apparently as a quasi-spiritual practice? The link had partially been set up by Armstrong, who'd talked of religion as an art form. It's perhaps what Emily Dickinson described in her poem that begins "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant <http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/1129.shtml> - Success in Circuit lies". We humans, she believed, tend as a rule only to catch glimpses of truth. We see it in our peripheral vision, out of the corner of one eye. Later in the same poem, she calls such insights "Truth's superb surprise". So it's no mere detail that she chose poetry as her medium. Poetry has precisely that capacity to use words in a way that's not linear, that defies logic. It allows you to remain alert to that which you can't quite see, rather than being fixated on what is clear and lies straight ahead. Music can achieve something similar. Aaron Copland <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Copland> put it memorably: "The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking: 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer to that would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'" Music as truth-telling in circuit. There's a second, less esoteric dimension to piano-playing as a possible spiritual practice. It has to do with the satisfaction of the physical activity itself, with the rewards of the discipline. Any parent who has insisted their child learns to play a musical instrument will know that such rewards come only after much struggle. I play the piano myself, and I can still recall my infantile tears as I was told to sit at the piano for at least 10 minutes before being allowed out to play. Now, though, I see they were tears well spent. For if you do enough practice, you'll reach a moment when the motion of your fingers across the keyboard is itself a pleasure, regardless of the sound. (I've often wondered whether some composers decide what to write solely on the basis that it feels good to play.) And then something else happens: there's the sense that the music is playing you, rather than you playing the music. Professional musicians must have this sense all the time, the very best concert performers becoming translucent to the music that they mediate. I think this explains how they play large chunks of music, involving possibly millions of notes, by memory. It's not that they memorise it bar by bar. Rather, they know the music so well that the notes could not go in any other place. Is that a spiritual experience? It could be construed as such, in this sense: musicians give themselves, via the discipline, to a communication that is far greater than themselves. The source of the music lies elsewhere - in the mind of the composer. But nonetheless, without the discipline and skill of the musician, the music could not be realised, could not be incarnated. Piano-playing, therefore, takes you out of yourself too. Therein lies much of its satisfaction. And there's one final aspect to it as a spiritual practice that occurred to me as Rusbridger spoke. It has to do with love. To be good at something doesn't just take time. It takes commitment, and that, in turn, must originate in your love of it. Similarly, to know something well, necessitates loving it first - so that you have the motivation to take the time to get to know it well. Simon Blackburn captures the idea when, in his book Think, he points out that people do things not always because they have reasons to do them, but because they have a concern for what they are doing. It's referred to as the non-cognitivist theory of action: you give yourself to something not because it is rational to do so, but because the thing seems good to you. Blackburn quotes Saint Augustine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo> , who had the same intuition: "There is the pull of the will and of love, wherein appears the worth of everything to be sought." I do not know whether Rusbridger would put it like this, but it seems to me that the "pull of love" is the force that might sustain the regular piano-playing to which he gives himself. To know that love in your life might be called a kind of blessing, one that reaches beyond the blessing of the music itself. It's a final thought that lends itself to the notion of piano-playing as an agnostic's spiritual practice.
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