Listening lessons: detachment
I remember the lesson as if it happened yesterday. I was playing Mozart’s Fantasia in C Minor, K. 475 with all the passion only an eighteen year old can bring to a piece of music. After I finished it, my instructor directed me to a particularly poignant section and asked me why I’d slowed down there. “Because it’s beautiful,” I replied. What followed was a discussion about the need to maintain a steady pulse—something I immediately corrected.
In another lesson with a different instructor, I galloped through Chopin’s “Ocean Etude” and the final movement of Prokofiev’s 7th Sonata with all the energy that only a fleet-fingered, ego-driven twenty-something pianist can bring to these pieces. Phrases were slaughtered. Notes flew everywhere. The tempo got faster. What followed was a discussion about how to stop letting my love for adrenaline direct my playing.
Both instances came to mind in a recent practice session when I was working out why I was suddenly having a difficult time playing a passage that my hands knew well. When I picked the problem apart, what I found was that I had such a strong internal drive to imbue the notes with meaning that my tense hands were choking the life out of the music.
People talk about the need for passion in the arts but few discuss the equally important quality of detachment. We avoid detachment because we fear it will make us sound mechanical and lifeless. Sometimes we avoid it because we want to marinate in the warmth of our burning love for the piece and don’t want to leave it for the cool-headed analytical work that makes for a secure understanding of the music. But detachment is a necessary part of being a good pianist because it is only when we can step away from our emotional and ego responses to the music that we can hear what the music really needs.
A wise teacher once told me that we do the audience a disservice when we try to do the feeling for them. I add that it also does a disservice to the music. It becomes distorted when we smother it with our own needs and unbridled feelings. On a practical level, when we’re not managing our energy well, we make it infinitely more difficult to play well. Balancing head and heart is a conundrum and those who do it well are players who have learned how to honor what the piece needs over what they may want to find or express in the music.
The biggest lesson I've learned from most of the instructors that I’ve had, and from careful analysis of my own practice habits, is the power of letting go. Detaching. To stop trying to direct the outcome of everything I play. Stop thinking too far ahead. Stop hanging on to notes too long. Stop expecting the music to give me more emotionally than it’s capable of giving me. I won’t bore you by cataloging how often these tendencies are played out in my non-musical life other than saying that in this lesson—as in many others—the piano is a mirror. Detachment—on and off the piano—is a life challenge.
Detachment is also an opportunity. It makes playing the piano easier and more musical and it frees us from the need to make the listener like it. Detachment gives us the breathing room to pick a manageable tempo. It offers us the space to see the piece for what it is and to serve it to the best of our abilities rather than asking the music to serve us and our own emotional needs. Detachment is a breath of cool air, the analytical moment when we know that sometimes the most noble way to play something is also the least showy.
How does one develop detachment at the piano? In my experience, it doesn’t mean trying to squelch my emotions but to focus on the music rather than myself. The emotions don’t go away, but when I stop focusing on them I can ask myself these two important questions:
How much energy does the piece need?
Am I putting too much physical effort into what I’m doing? Am I imbuing it with too much of my emotional response to it? What happens when I sit back and just play it coldly? The answers that come up every time I ask myself this question about the music I’m playing never fail to surprise me, and most of the time, I find it helps rather than hurts the piece.
Am I asking too much from the piece?
Am I wanting an emotional release or do I want to play the music? Am I asking more of the music than it’s capable of giving me? Am I looking for ego validation? The more I unpack why I’m overly attached emotionally, the easier it is to see where I can step back and acknowledge that my expectations are the problem.
In this intricate dance of pianist and music, heart and head, passion and detachment, our best playing lies in honoring the music by managing ourselves. When we do this we can see detachment for the gift that it is—the clear-eyed truth-teller that keeps us from going astray on our journey to bring music to life with our hands.
Photo by Paul Pastourmatzis, courtesy of UpSplash