Articulating Life

If you’re like me, you’re probably leading your life somewhere between the unreality of multi-tasking and the impracticality of single-tasking. Due to cultural demands, we are unable to totally single-task, and we are constantly, often unwittingly, drawn into attempts at multi-tasking that seem to have some bad side effects.

Perhaps we musicians have something to offer this personally challenging scenario and potential step in the evolution of the human race.

In music, as in life, we deal with numerous layers of happenings that are somehow coordinated and contain any amount of details of varying natures and significance. Raising our consciousness of the presence and functions of these elements can greatly enhance our performances.

When doing the discipline of music, we regularly and comfortably handle that range of organizations within a rich overall texture. How do we keep those layers enlivened and purposefully unified? We practice the art of articulation.

In one way of thinking, articulation determines everything in music. Our sense of phrases is created by various articulations, and phrasing is the name of the game if you want to be a clear, elegant, and moving player. So I am hopeful that processing the activities of one’s life through the concept of articulation might provide some wisdom for leading life with clarity and meaning.

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We like to play and live in long legato phrases. Those phrases and that articulation provide concentration and continuity. I bet they really warm up the brain and soul like extended periods of true single-tasking. My hope for you and for me is that we spend most of our time moving along those strong lines.

But to phrase well, we need to be aware of many aspects of the phrase at hand.

 How long does it last?

How do we need to prepare for it?

What is its shape and how wide is its range?

At what points does it require more energy and at what points less?

What will be the impact after the fact?

Many times, we need to engage with a series of phrases as a more macro-unit. And there are even bigger projects that happen in stages over days or whole periods in our lives.  

Some projects are so big that they need to be laid out like a musical form. We need a schedule or an outline of what is to be achieved and when – a score.

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While we’re traveling with the overall flow of phrases and groups of phrases - the flow of life - lovely nuances come along that we can express well if we recognize and understand them.

There are the staccato moments: social media posts that give friends a glimpse of how we’re phrasing right then, quick phone calls than lend a bounce for a second, or thank you notes that incisively assert spiritual realities . . .

Then there are accents. Conversations in which we engage with real personal investment are one of my favorite types of emphatic gestures. Such accents are even nicer when they come in a syncopated way like an unexpected talk in the hallway that turns to profound things and gives both participants goose bumps and a new perspective.

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Maintaining harmonic support is an ongoing concern in a rich texture. It usually doesn’t work to drop the chords suddenly and leave the melody out there alone.

There are lots of background activities that support our phrasing: labor in the practice room, spiritual study, prayer, getting rest and basic nutrition, and all the behind-the-scenes work that gives things a good chance to go well and stay healthy.

And then there are those end-of-the-day activities that don’t need a lot of mental engagement but do require repetition. Musicians save physical drill for the end of the practice day when attention is waning. In life, there are activities like that - physical exercise, for instance – activities that only really benefit us when we return to them regularly.

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As we mature, we learn to recognize and articulate more and more large-scale organizations. Good mentors help us with this. We become tuned-in to multiple collections of phrases which, along with their harmonic support, make their way to great climaxes before subsiding in staves of diminished activity. Knowledge of these meta-progressions has implications for all the local level details. Those powerful events and major turning points require preparation and great attention over a sustained time so as to arise most profoundly from their contexts.

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I wonder if it might not even be useful to see the phrases of one’s life, or at least of one’s year, as a work to be composed and then played. It’s bound to be some sort of multi-movement work and there will probably be aspects of sonata to it. How wonderful to settle into singing our lyrical slow movement or to dance our year’s refreshing minuet!

And then there’s return of material - sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating - but that’s how we learn.

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When we are looking to interpret a year or a life, we are seeking to see and inflect the full array and meaning of its passages.

At some points, a leggiero touch is required and the material is communicated in mysterious fragments because those for whom we play are afraid to hear a full loving melody.

Other times, we must move slowly through repeated motives as the tune is hard to learn.

We discern the importance of slurring, of connecting certain moments to others and certain people to others.

We develop ease with tapering and dovetailing as we listen sensitively at transitions, transitions that require gentleness because things are tenuous.

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In all of this, we are striving to be the best musicians we can be and the best livers of life we can be. To do so, we need to keep asking questions about how what we’re playing relates to the ensemble.

Which parts are most important?

How do the parts relate?

Who has the main melody?

Should it be a solo?

What’s the best balance of our part with the others?

And what needs to crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, ritenuto?

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In the context of the whole, our own music means so much more. There are beautiful phrases we want extended, and sometimes they are. But many times a cadence is needed. Along the way, we do well to place a tenuto on special happenings, arriving with great intention and lingering a bit afterwards to feel their full effect. Some of those special happenings turn out to be true structural tones that define us and the shape of our music from the deepest level: graduations, conversions, marriages, births, deaths . . .

Sometimes we modulate, smoothly or not. Sometimes there’s an incursion of a totally unfamiliar type of music. And sometimes we have to suspend all thought for articulation as we struggle to keep up with the rhythms as we’re forced to sight-read through some crisis in our lives. There are even situations in which the stakes are so high and the need for singular focus is so great that we must, for a time, truly perform our lives. Our audience depends on us.

But at the beginning and the end, and at a few resting points in-between, there is the tonic.