What is it that gives extra credit to artists who make it seem easy? Maria Callas didn't just have an unusually clear voice, or better timbre, or enough range. She had all those. But the ineffable distinction between her brilliance and another's not-quite-there seems to my ear to be associated with ease. The technical difficulty of opera singing amplifies the importance of seeming at ease or in the flow, doesn't it? Ease isn't the same as fluidity or the sense of being well-practiced or comfortable with the material. It looks like it incorporates those things, but it expresses a feeling of being at one or in direct contact with the muse, the feeling that the artist is being moved rather than that the artist is actively moving air.
I'm not a musician, and I'm especially not a singer. My 10,000 hours of practice are with writing. The Malcolm Gladwell-distributed theory is that fluidity in any vocation starts appearing at around 10,000 hours. When I started to write without thinking about it, I became ashamed of my writing. Sounds perverse, right? I could find nothing to take pride in. Before, while I was learning the tools and ridding myself of the first round of cliches, I took great pride in my writing, especially as it seemed to improve. But one day, I was done. Writing just happened. I started to think of it as a parlor trick. It always worked, and seldom was far from me. When a dear friend expressed admiration for something I had written, and I responded that it was my parlor trick, she became alarmed. To her, "parlor trick" meant insincerity. I think she was wise to be alarmed, and now I think I was wrong to have used the term. At the time, I truly didn't believe I had done anything, or written anything particularly eloquent. I didn't feel I had done anything much at all. Taking credit for it seemed crazy. Insincere even.
With work and discipline, anyone meets his or her capacity to leap onto the back of the winged muse and take off. I imagine it feels the same for just about everyone who experiences it. No? A venture capitalist feels it when she starts the dance. An opera singer when she hears the overture. An athlete when the gun goes off. A plumber when he reaches for a wrench.
Last night watching Bellini's The Capulets and the Montagues, I couldn't help think about Maria Callas singing Norma. Her seemingly effortless "Casta diva," the aria she opens with, floats into the divine while staying painfully human and worldly. She is meeting the muse on both its terms and hers. There were moments last night like that. And that was enough. It didn't need to be sustained to be welcomed and to last and last. Here's another performance by the mezzo-soprano I enjoyed last night, Joyce DiDonato, playing Romeo, and a different Juliet:
So what is it to meet the muse and stop taking credit for mastery, and at the same time feel the sincerity of something flowing through me that is not necessarily just me? It's as if by calling it a parlor trick I wasn't giving credit to the mix of history, discipline, and conscious acceptance of the divine that allows the flow to emerge as a timeless aria, or just a note to a friend.
My mind is good at sensing fault, honing in on the cause, labeling it, and gleefully passing judgment. We're miraculous self-improvement machines, every one of our 100 trillion cells checking its own health all the time, and passing along any warning signs so repair cells can scurry in and get things fixed.
Last night during live music I noticed myself withdrawing into judgment two big times. The first was during Moby-Dick, a modern work performed by the San Francisco Opera. As I sensed fault -- uh, where are the melodies, and why does everything feel like a transition, and it's pretty warm up here in the balcony, and these lyrics are pushing me too fast -- I battled to stay in touch with what was actually going on on stage. I lost the battle and left. I'll probably never listen to Moby-Dick again, and so I'll go to my death ignorant about whether it was me -- the Flipper burger I had, the two drinks at Absinthe, the heat, my own restlessness -- or the choice of singers, or the hall, or the composition itself. I say I didn't like it, but in truth I didn't give it a chance. I just reacted negatively and got myself out of there. That's how my ego works on me. It's as if culture is analogous to my cellular structure, and needs fear and caution to motivate repair and strength.
Because the second time I noticed my withdrawal into judgment was more compartmentalized and definable, I was able to overcome it and stay with the music. After I walked out on the opera, I headed to Phil Lesh's joint in San Rafael, Terrapin Crossroads. He was playing a bluegrass set with his sons and other friends. Just the idea of that touches me. Bluegrass players start as living room musicians, and so there's a family tradition: the Carter Family, its spinoff Cashes, the Whites, Osbornes, the other Whites called the Kentucky Colonels, the Stanley Brothers, the Monroe brothers, the Scruggs family, Red Allen and his sons Neal and Harley, the Dillards, and on and on, and in Marin, the Leshes.
What I walked into couldn't have felt more surprising and lovely. The lovely part was the song being played well, Early Morning Rain. I remember talking up Gordon Lightfoot to my friends in the early Seventies, and getting reluctance. Isn't he too sappy? Too Old Folk? Too commercial? Folk, bluegrass, country and rock were crossing over each other, and sometimes it was jarring in unexpected ways. The mind likes what it likes, and doesn't want to let in the new without being sure. I've seen a lot of bluegrass bands do Early Morning Rain, and Lightfoot himself, and the Leshes' version was pure commitment to a place and a feel and a harmony. The surprise was Phil's own contribution. His bass tone was characteristically subtle, staying low, resonant and cleared of bright spots so that it could unobtrusively take care of the bottom. But my mind was telling me to watch out. It sensed something different going on, and it went to work to label it either danger or delight. What I then heard was that Phil was playing the melody, the absolute lead line of the song, without changing his instrument's posture as a humble contrapuntal contributor. He was alone out there, and the band was following his melody. I wondered how often I had heard a bass sing an aria like a soprano, and it's probably not often. Sure, in a solo. But this was the very structure of the song itself being led by the bass. It was as if he took the song's introspection and amplified it by moving it into an instrument that by nature is largely introspective.
Here's a clip from another Lesh and sons show:
So what did I get judgmental about? It didn't happen during Early Morning Rain. It was later, when guitarist Ross James started playing the hell out of his Telecaster. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong, or at least seemed wrong to my ego threat machine. It wasn't that he was overplaying or had picked the wrong genre to fit, or anything about his technique, which seemed flawless enough and inspired enough. It was the licks themselves, which sounded like straight country licks adjusted to allow a knowing wink that this was only barely updated stuff that every Nashville sideman has to learn. It was when I heard "barely updated" cross my mind that I could label what seemed to be in need of repair. He wasn't playing these licks to learn them and challenge them. He was playing them to show that he knew them. It was like he was mugging. That's OK at times, but not right then. The rest of the band seemed to be deep into the difficulty of exploration in the tightass speed and complex harmonic requirements of bluegrass. He seemed outside that context, as if he was playing to the audience -- the one that I was part of, and the one that was on stage with him -- while the others were playing for themselves and each other and the constant search for divine sound.
I don't want to be on Ross James' case. It's one sample. Maybe he was just in his cups last night, enjoying his extroversion. Maybe he was clowning around because it was the right time for him to clown around. That, too is a problem with the whole judgment apparatus. It sure likes to universalize and make things absolute and sealed shut. If I had been in a clowning mood, Ross James might have delighted my self-centered ego.
Here's a funny thing I noticed one day about Phil Lesh. In the Skull and Roses version of Bertha, through the whole song Phil is mostly playing the riff from the song Judy in Disguise. He shows how a simple riff can be worked and reworked and explored in the context of a single song, and still humbly support a band and create a feel. It's introspective work, even if the riff is danceably extro.
