Listening exercises: The Way of Mountains and Deserts

Classical piano performances are similar to giving speeches. We learn a piece, polish it to the best of our ability, and then we walk out on stage and present it to an audience. We focus on the music and what’s in our own heads, not our listeners or the environment around us. We block out non-musical things. We present, we don’t dialogue.

I’ve had a lifetime of performing music this way. It’s so engrained in my piano DNA that I never thought to question it. Sure, I envied the freedom of jazz and pop performers, but I worked within the safety of clear directions and written guidelines. Every piano teacher I ever had trained me to put my best musical foot forward each time I performed by honing my interpretation of the music and then teaching me to deliver it to listeners as faithfully and flawlessly as possible.

All of this changed when I began learning The Way of Mountains and Deserts, a four part suite originally commissioned and premiered by acclaimed pianist and Greek Orthodox cantor, Paul Barnes. Written by composer and native flautist Ron Warren, this concert work asks the pianist to play not in the way classical players have been taught to present music, but rather as a response to the people and things around us at the moment we play. In other words, he asks pianists to converse with the world rather than monologue to it. Ron Warren, in his guest post Song Catching, shared this about his style of music making:

“[It] is not about self-expression or technical display. It’s not about finding sound metaphors for what we are feeling. It’s more about being in right relationship with a particular place, listening to all the Beings in that place and perhaps receiving a gift of song that can be shared with the community. The musician is more a facilitator than a ‘creator’ or ‘performer’.”

When I first read these words I was drawn to the idea of making music this way, but tradition and training kept me from applying it to my own playing. It wasn’t until I began learning The Way of Mountains and Deserts that I caught a glimpse of what Ron was writing about. That gave me my first important lesson: I had to experience playing like this to begin to understand it.

First some information about the piece: Parts 1 and 4 of this suite are written in standard classical notation. Parts 2 and 3 are open, flexible, and less specific. Opportunities for improvisation abound. All four sections utilize elements of Indigenous American music, including dance forms usually found at Intertribal powwows. All four sections are gifts to the Beings that share the earth with us. One, “Song for Turtle,” consists of fragments of musical lines scattered over a picture of a turtle.

Gulp. I practiced Parts 1, 2, and 3 for a month, set up a Zoom chat with Ron and asked him (like the good classical player that I am) how exactly he wanted me to play them. He smiled and then patiently repeated everything he’d written in his guest post about song catching and being in right relationship with a particular place. He reminded me of how his first flute teacher taught him to play by showing him the basic fingerings of the Native Flute and then saying, “Now go sit in the woods for three days and listen.”

I thought about what Ron said. I listened to many of his Native Flute recordings, and I read the book of poems that he told me inspired the suite, Where Clouds Are Formed, by Ofelia Zepeda. I listened to the many birdsongs I heard on my daily walks. I listened to ice in the Fox River creak as it began to thaw and to the rush of the spring runoff when the water ran free. When I sat at the piano, I listened to the room, to the other sounds both inside and outside the building. I listened to my breath. And then I played.

Something happened. For the first time since I was a small child, the critic stepped away from the piano bench and the music poured through me. When I finished playing, I was in tune with the world around me. All the questions I had about the “right” way to play the pieces dissolved. There was just the listening to all that the world around me was offering in joyful full-throated life, and the notes I added to the conversation.

The experience transformed not only my playing but also my writing. I’m learning to listen. I’m learning to catch the song that wants to be played, and to write the words that insist on being written. I’m learning to keep quiet when others are the ones gifted with songs and stories. I’m learning that this new way of creating is a process of undoing a lifetime of goal-driven structure and that learning to trust this softening, this listening, will take the rest of my life. And I’m learning that in doing so, the isolation of performing has been replaced by the warmth of communication. Each song and word a gift, each utterance an offering—this is The Way of Mountains and Deserts.

To listen to Paul Barnes’s premier: The Way of Mountains and Deserts

To order a copy of this music, visit Ron Warren

Photo by Mick Haupt, courtesy of UpSplash