Don't duck your responsibilities

And then we quacked. And the quacking was good.

Recently I led one of my Musician@Work weekend sessions in Paris. Five participants, three of them professionally trained musicians, two very experienced amateurs, everyone talented, intelligent, alert, and friendly. And everyone human: full of contradictions and paradoxes, with the potential of becoming pretzels of twisty emotions.

On the surface, the work session was about making music. In reality, it was about being human, and about sharing our contradictions and paradoxes in the form of sounds made and sounds heard. You know: un-pretzeling ourselves, solving our contradictions and embracing our paradoxes.

Let’s use that old and useful tool, the four-element list. Today’s choice of words:

Conception, Perception, Intention, Action.

The act or action of making music, playing an instrument, singing, studying a score, performing in front of a friend or in front of a crowd of strangers seems to be the most important thing. It’s immediate and real; it’s happening right now; I’m playing, singing, talking, writing, I’m doing something; I act, therefore I am.

But the action is only a sort of outward manifestation, subject to forces and impulses that hide deeply behind the action itself.

Our minds carry dozens, hundreds, and thousands of concepts. We have our own definitions of what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, what is central and what is peripheral. Our manners, for instance: for some people it’s right and good to air-kiss the cheeks of friends, for other people it’s taboo, ugly, perverted, and criminal: it’s sexual harassment, and you know it! The air-kiss is a relatively banal example. Conception shapes our aesthetics, our careers, our family life, our lives. If you want to change your actions, you have no choice but to go dig into the conceptions that animate your actions.

Look at something for two seconds; look at it for two minutes; look at it for ten minutes: your perception of this one thing will change. Look at something when you’re hungry, look at it in the dark, look at it when your son is throwing a tantrum. Again, that one thing will be highly variable in your perception. Two people are standing next to each other, watching the sunset. They see two different suns, two different skies, two different marvels. Perception, in other words, is subjective and flexible. You might be sure, sure, SURE that your best friend has blue eyes, until one day you realize that her eyes are green. Years, decades, and you hadn’t actually seen her eyes.

Conception determines a lot about your perceptions. Conception is a database of right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn’t, believe and disbelieve. It means that you can hate or dismiss something even before you see or hear it. Conception might make you blind and deaf.

You play something for your friends, let’s say half a page of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. What is your intention? The possibilities are endless. To share, to give, to impose; to be liked by the friend, or to annoy the friend; to honor Bach (the deity of structure and knowledge) or to play with Bach (the deity of invention and pleasure); to make yourself seen and heard, or to disappear into the music itself; to bitterly obey a long-dead parent who insisted that you play when you didn’t want to, or to joyfully disobey the long-dead parent who really wanted you to be a doctor or engineer, not a barefoot musician without a retirement plan; to play beautifully or to play skillfully; to be good, to be better, to be best . . . there are so many possible intentions. And these intentions, in collaboration with your conceptions and perceptions, definitely and absolutely and visibly and audibly shape your actions.

That’s why we quacked.

Early in the workshop we tried to do a little exercise in which our conceptions, perceptions, and intentions conspired against us. It was simple: sing a drone; sustain, as a group, a single unchanging pitch. We were too serious, too tentative, too judgmental, too awkward, too concerned, too invested in doing something elevated, something good, something good! But us humans, with our wonderful contradictions and paradoxes, we can also decide to suddenly change our intentions and conceptions.

We carry, by birth, a feral dimension, spontaneous and free from judgment, a lively energy plentifully demonstrated by babies and children and screaming toddlers, by sports fanatics at a bar watching a match on a big TV screen, by clowns with no fear of ridicule. Simplifying it, we’re able to behave “primordially.” In Paris, after we caught ourselves being timid and critical of ourselves, we decided to become fowl and foul, and we performed, collectively and for our pleasure and delight, a sonata of quacks, a sextet of cock-a-doodles, a symphony of silliness. Our intention to be admirable good boys and girls was overwhelmed by the crescendo poco a poco sempre of screeches, squeaks, clucks, and cha-caws. Then we did a decrescendo poco a poco sempre of these bestial impulses, and we settled into a sweet and sonorous drone, and we took turns singing beautiful melismatic improvisations in tune with the drone. We had arrived at a new conception of good and bad, together with new perceptions and intentions. And we acted as never before.

The quacks had birthed Kyrie Eleison, and the rest of the weekend in Paris was divine.

©2024, Pedro de Alcantara

A Year of Creativity

A year ago (on July 30, 2022 exactly) I started drawing with brush and ink. Back then I wrote about how it all came about. I thought you might be interested in some of the things I learned about the creative process during this wonderful year.

1. Creativity is the interaction of doing something for the first time (or as if for the first time) and doing the same thing hundreds or thousands of time. The innocent child is sometimes more creative than the jaded expert. We’re all familiar with beginner’s luck, which we can also call Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (the title of a famous, excellent little book). Not knowing what you’re getting into gives you a sort of freedom. And if you’d like to “practice the freedom,” so to speak, you have two good choices: keep learning new things; or learn how to “remain new inside.”

2. Creativity, like everything else, has a rhythm—its own rhythm, for you to discover and to play with. I mean the rhythms of a long-term project (conception, creation, revision, publication), the rhythms of the seasons and days and hours, and the rhythms of the moment: you can drown if you jump onto the boat a second too late. It took me 64 years to start making these drawings; it takes me a few seconds or a minute to make some of them. If in the moment of making the drawing I’m in sync with The Rhythm . . . wow, the few seconds give birth to something beautiful and meaningful. And if I’m not in sync? Nah. Meh. Foo. Blah.

3. Creativity can be a response to an inner impulse or to an outside pressure or desire. You feel that you really, really need to do something and you can’t explain exactly why; or you feel that you’d like to compete with someone else, or to “produce” something. One is an inner impulse, the other is an outer impulse. We each have our own balance of these necessary forces, but my preference has been to listen to the inner and tune out the outer.

4. Creativity bubbles up from intuition and improvisation. Incomprehensible dreams that you don’t remember very well; sudden bursts of words that express a long-suppressed thought; decisions that aren’t decisions: out for a walk, you turn left instead of right, and you can’t say why you did that, and there you find yourself talking to a stranger who tells you something very special. In creative work, craft and skill are very important . . . but they come after the dreams and bursts and indecisions, not before them and above all not in place of them.

5. Creativity and the ego have an interesting dance. Creativity can be an affirmation of the ego (“I made this thing here! Look at it, and look at me!”) or a bypassing of the ego (“I don’t know if or how or why I made this”). With my own creative work, I feel that many things make themselves: drawings, poems, compositions, pedagogical insights. I kinda receive them and pass them along without a feeling of ownership. This takes trust and faith in the process; the absence of pride (which is a sort of inflation of the ego); and a more or less permanent state of wonderment and gratitude. Less ego, more flow!

6. Creative explorations happen in a context. In the case of my drawings, this included dozens of visits to museums and galleries, reading books, watching documentaries about the creative process, going for seemingly idle walks during which the creative process kept distilling itself in the background. Places and people, events, travels, sunny days and rainy days, siestas, biweekly visits to the street market: any one drawing of mine gathers the “totality of context” and expresses it in a piece of paper. Alertness to context helps creativity.

7. Creativity doesn’t necessarily mean pleasant experiences only. You might become obsessed with the process, and you might not sleep well or take care of your business. You might pick fights with people dear to you just because you’re in the middle of a creative burst, and those people dear to you have their own needs and wants, their own rhythms, their own demands (some of them reasonable!) on your time and your space. Beloved ones apart, you can also become frustrated, discouraged, bored, and etc. (to coin an emotion) in the work itself, and “in you.” It’s kinda normal!

8. Creativity takes your life in directions you can’t imagine or foresee. My drawings went places as if by themselves, and I tagged along to discover what the drawings wanted to do. Here’s an example: I passed from ink to gouache, and to a style I’ll call “post-childhood finger-drawing;” then I passed from finger-drawing to wrist-drawing and forearm-drawing. Whaaaat, forearm???? In the middle of my year-of-drawing-with-ink, I started writing some poems in Spanish, a language I’ve been studying with a lot of joy and some discipline. The poems were organically born of the drawings, but during the first few weeks and months of brush-ink-gouache-forearm exploration I totally didn’t expect their emergence. Plus, these poems became quite ambitious and intricate, partly in response to the theme of my drawings. Had you told me five years ago that I’d be officiating the happy marriage of Spanish and art, I’d have called you muy loco, ay caramba.

Would you like eight kitchen magnets? Here they are.

1. Remain new inside.

2. Rhythm is everything.

3. Obey the inner impulse.

4. Intuition before skill.

5. Less ego, more flow.

6. Be alert to the context.

7. Displeasure exists.

8. Creativity leads, you follow.

©2023, Pedro de Alcantara

The Portal

You can be alert and adaptable, to a varying degree; or confused and disconnected, also to a varying degree. Very alert and adaptable is desirable but not easy to achieve. Very confused and disconnected is problematic, don’t you think? So we all look for ways of going toward the desirable state, which is called by many names: embodied mindfulness, integration, happy-healthy, and I’m Okay Thanks, among others.

The journey isn’t linear. You can’t just take five little steps with no effort, and voilà! We humans are full of contradictory impulses, conflicting needs and wants, harsh circumstances, unconscious habits, tics, parasites, microbes, fauna and flora. Plus in-laws.

And yet, for millennia people have traveled the road to integration, and sometimes successfully. Many paths have been trod: prayer, ritual, sacrifice, discipline; concentrate on your breath, concentrate on your posture, concentrate on a sacred word. Procedures may include pilgrimage, reading, chanting, joining a group, leaving a group, waking up early, eating certain foods, dieting, fasting, drinking, not drinking . . . the list is long and fascinating, from Abstinence to Zen.

I believe that the passage from confused to alert can happen through any portal. You haven’t seen a friend of yours for a couple of years, and when you meet her again you sense she has changed in ways you can’t pinpoint. “You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. I took up ballroom dancing.” What is interesting is that she didn’t simply learn ballroom dancing; she worked on herself; she faced some of her longstanding fears about movement and sensuality; she reached out to other people and to the wider world; she learned a repertory of songs and dances; she became skillful at keeping a steady practice, going to dance several times a week; she passed from the private sphere of her home and her head to the public sphere of give-and-take in front of others; she traveled to Argentina for a tango workshop, and to Cuba for a salsa workshop. Her passport got stamped, if you know what I mean.

Artwork by Saul Steinberg, via the Saul Steinberg Foundation.

“You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. I’m learning puppetry.”

“You look different.” “Thanks for noticing. You won’t believe this, but I took up ping-pong.”

Any portal will do it, though different people prefer different portals. In the Japanese Zen tradition, for instance, portals have included archery, flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, and calligraphy. And sitting. Sitting will take you there. Ordinary life is full of portals that sometimes go unnoticed. To sort the laundry isn’t to sort the laundry; it is to work on yourself as you sort the laundry, discerning patterns, sensing textures and seeing colors, organizing objects, organizing your home, organizing your mind to accomplish a needed task, thinking about your children, having a million sensations and a billion emotions. Every sock tells a story. “My Hole, My Self.”

Hey, I said it already: people are full of contradictions. Becoming good at sorting the laundry won’t necessarily turn you into a model human being. We know that Zen masters can be irascible and unreasonable, that great painters can be suicidal drunks, that martial artists can be sadists who inflict pain on others for no good reason, that saints poop. “Perfection isn’t a human attribute; humanness is.” In life you’ll change and grow to the extent that you can. Existential change isn’t measurable. Working on yourself is a journey, not a destination. Poop like a saint.

My piano method will be published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in a few months. I think of it as a portal for you to work on yourself and become less confused and more alert, about the piano and music but also about yourself. You don’t need to be “good” in order to play the piano. You don’t need talent, previous experience, or anything at all; you just need to pass through the portal. It takes “willingness,” which in itself merits a whole blog post or encyclopedia since it’s the one requirement without which your passport won’t get stamped, if you know what I mean.

My portal is multidimensional. Ten chapters, plus introductory and concluding materials. Mysteriously wonderful little exercises that sound good and feel good to the fingers, hands, minds, hearts, and cosmogonies. Compositions, some four bars long, others seven pages long. Supporting video clips. Anecdotes, explanations, encouragement, attractive photos of children being children. There’s a photo of a baby goat, jumping. Wow, it’s one incredible adorable goat. My compositions have built-in space for you to think, sense, breathe, and decide how you’re going to play something, how you’re going to work on yourself, how you’re going to grow and change. Yes, every chapter starts easy, although chapter seven, for instance, is more elaborate and demanding than chapter one. Strange as it may seem, the method is suited to complete beginners and to concert pianists. The jumping goat is everyone’s friend.

Change-and-growth self-report: The six years during which I’ve worked on my piano method have been wonderful. My piano teacher and adoptive brother Alexandre Mion is wonderful. The production team at OUP is wonderful. The rehearsal studios that I frequent in Paris are wonderful. Walking from my home to the Studio Bleu 40 minutes away is wonderful. My students are wonderful. Receiving musical insights from unfathomable sources is wonderful. I’m still irascible and unreasonable, but there are days when I feel like a saint. It’s wonderful.

Swimming in the whole

The creative process is a totality. Some people might call it a whole world. Pretentious intellectuals like me like calling it a Gestalt, which is the same as a totality but the word has nice echoes, connotations, imaginings. You can take the Autobahn from Gestalt to Bauhaus.

When the totality doesn’t completely envelop your creative efforts, you’re likely to come up with crappy results. If, however, you dwell in the totality, results are, in themselves, secondary—and likely to be quite satisfying.

A young child digging a hole in a sandbox is immersed in the totality, and for this reason we find the child terribly lovable, worthy of veneration. The hole is secondary, but fascinating were you to analyze it. But let’s leave the hole aside and notice the totality. There’s the environment (a sandbox in a city park, late afternoon in summer); the materials of the creative work (bucket, scoop, sand); the commitment and investment of the young child in pursuing a goal (digging, digging, digging a hole); the psychomotor presence of the child, barefoot and in a deep squat (the animal living in space and time); the paradoxical mixture of “I’m just playing” and “This is serious business” (serious business); the silent stories that the child is telling herself and has been telling herself ever since she told herself her First Story (Indiana Jones); and the elemental, symbolic nature of the act (sand, sandbox, beach, desert, caravan, thirst, mirage, oasis, infinity, eternity). All of it is happening at the same time: it’s not a linear sequence (this, then that), but a kaleidoscopic amalgamation of all dimensions into a Gestalt (Autobahn).

It doesn’t matter in what domain you pursue the creative process: visual arts, music, writing, cooking, architecture, professional therapeutic work, politics, mathematics, brain surgery, TikTok. In the totality you shall find meaning, direction, and practical results. Not in the totality? Your brain-surgery patient will be “accidentally” lobotomized. By you, of course.

I recently added a domain to my creative pursuit: drawing with brush and ink. It’s a natural development within my drawing explorations, but it’s a new thing for me. If ever I did anything with brush and ink, it might have happened in seventh grade but I have no memory of it whatsoever. Therefore, it never happened! Ever, whatsoever, never!

It’s a new thing, I’m telling you.

There’s an art-supply store about five or seven minutes’ walk from my home. It’s packed, packed! with everything, everything! that I might want or need for an art project, art project! Sometimes I go there to buy nothing but a pencil—just to go there and to soak in its atmosphere and to dream of colors and shapes. I went in and chose an A2 sketchbook, on sale at 5 euros which is 5 dollars. 25 sheets of white paper, each sheet already an art work, practically by birth. A2 is the equivalent of four sheets of office paper: smaller than the Himalayas, but larger than a ladybug. I needed a brush. I have no experience with brushes, with using them, or with buying them. What kind, how big, how small, how expensive? I don’t know! The store has hundreds of brushes to choose from! Which one? I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know know know! And I picked one, medium sized, inexpensive: ultimately, it doesn’t matter which brush I get, because I’m just entering the maze and any portal will do. The main thing is to pass through and go in. Overthinking your choices can be nicht-Gestalt, so to speak.

I approached the manager to ask her about ink. French friendliness is different from American or Brazilian friendliness. The manager is somewhat serious, like a schoolteacher about to give you a grade lower than you expect. But I think it’s a façade: I bet she’s the archetypical schoolteacher who really cares for the kids in class, but who doesn’t externalize her caring because she risks crying with too much love. She’s direct and clear, businesslike. Showing her my brush, I said to her, “I don’t know what I want, I don’t know if you have it, and I don’t know where it’d be if you have it.” I mimicked sticking the brush into an invisible pot of ink, stirred it, and provided a slurpy splashy soundtrack. She understood me to perfection. She walked me to the corner of the store where the inks hid in plain sight, and she suggested an inexpensive pot of black ink appropriate for my learnings. I asked her, “Do I have the right to adore you?” She laughed briefly, then said, “Sure, I like it when people adore me.” I paid and left. Paper, brush, ink, and the help of a benevolent goddess in finding it all. Plus, a story that is meaningful to me and that will be forever associated with my brush-and-ink explorations.

Materials, discovery, pleasure, adoration. Territory, exploration, orientation, pleasure, joy. Adoration. Repeat yourself deliriously when you’re having a spiritual breakthrough: pleasure, joy, adoration.

Did you know that ink has a staining property? Blotch, splotch, fleck, speck, early death, crematorium. There’s no way I could blotch my wife, I mean, my home, my golden carpet, my babies, my cats, my cello, my piano, my heirlooms, or my wedding dress (some items on this list are fictional). I decided to go draw in my courtyard downstairs. I put on a pair of gym shorts and an old T-shirt, and barefoot to the courtyard I went.

My courtyard is a rectangle of perhaps 60 square meters. Low-slung apartment buildings on every side. Windows looking in. Four small olive trees in clay pots, though not producing olives. Two water taps, one of them with a hose attached, yes! And six or seven garbage cans in the standardized French format (here they’re called poubelles, and we use them for general waste but also for recycling paper and glass). I’ve lived in this building for 20 years, and I’ve entered and exited the courtyard thousands and thousands of times, each passage imprinting a little something in my memory, physical and emotional. I played concerts here during the pandemic confinement: short performances of my own music, for an audience of a few neighbors including two wonderful little kids.

I put two of the cleaner recycling garbage cans side by side and covered them with an old bedsheet. And this became a stable surface on which I could lay my sketchbook.

Neighbors come and go. There’s a subtle soundscape, mostly faint and distant: airplanes, city traffic, doors opening and closing, roadworks. The soundscape is caressing and agreeable: the city is alive, the buildings are alive, the neighbors are alive. Once I knew everything and everyone was alive, I started the physical, oh the very physical process of splotching and splecking. Brush into ink pot, brush onto page, gesture, movement: this is a drawing, this is art. It’s a dance, it’s Tai Chi, it’s air guitar, it’s shadow boxing, it’s squatting like a little child digging a hole. After I draw, I pull the page off the sketchbook and I lay it on the ground to dry. A work session might encompass 25 drawings, 25 dances.

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Art is life is paradox. Nobody can define art, and nobody can encapsulate life. How hard am I thinking when I splotch a sheet of paper? It’s paradoxical, because my goal is and isn’t and isn’t and is to make art. My goal is discovery and pleasure. My goal is joy and adoration. My goal is to be barefoot in summer. My goal is to move as if not thinking, and yet my accumulated thoughts of 64 years are inevitably present when I move as if not thinking. I make gestural decisions. I test angles of contact. There’s speed, rhythm, and choreography. I’m clear and vague, I’m determined and flexible, I know a lot and I know very little: it’s all true. To the casual observer, it only takes me three seconds to do any one of my drawings. But that’s misleading. Each drawing takes me 64 years and three seconds.

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The creative process is like a swimming pool or a pond or the ocean. I’m inside it; I’m enveloped by it, bathed by it. I float and I swim. The current takes me somewhere, and I follow along. Or, like a dolphin at play, I take the initiative and I jump out of the water and fall back into it again. The main thing, though, is to be in the water, totally; and not separate from it.

Last year I went to hear a famous violinist give a performance of classical music at one of the main Paris concert halls. Once he started playing, I quickly knew that I’d sit there waiting for the first half of the concert to be over, passing the time in frustration and resentment until I could rush back home during the intermission. The fellow wasn’t immersed in the totality; his playing was smooth and very, very professional. But . . . no. He wasn’t “total,” and the experience of watching him wasn’t “total-inducing.” Mine is a subjective perception, needlessly harsh, difficult to explain and to justify. Next time we meet, you and I will share subjective perceptions and harsh judgments, and we’ll do our best to justify them. Or maybe not. Justification is overrated.

We go to the movies and become irritated at something with high production values but no immersion in the creative totality. We start reading a book and sometimes we want to throw it out of the window, or we wish harm upon the writer, famous and accomplished as he and she may be. A painting can sell for millions of dollars and yet be creatively worthless. A gleaming new building goes up in a nice neighborhood, and we take one look at it and we see catastrophic waste, an urban-planning disaster, a moral failure. And we do our best not to dynamite the building.

Territory, materials, motivation, joy, pleasure, stories, paradoxes, symbols, metaphors. Adoration.

The other day I heard someone say, “Art is all about expression.” I didn’t dynamite the building, but I strongly disagreed! Mentally, in silence! “Art is all about connection,” I blasted telepathically.

“Oh, yeah? Connection to what?”

“Let’s go to the Place des Vosges. A little kid is digging a hole there.”

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©2022, Pedro de Alcantara

To know, or not to know? That's the question.

Recently I gave a workshop in Paris on the theme of creativity. Ten people working together, eight nationalities, thirteen languages, quite a festival. (The photos above are from similar workshops in Glasgow, Paris, Porto, and Montevideo.)

Partly because of the subject matter itself, and partly because of my temperament and my pedagogical convictions, most of the workshop consisted in our playing all sorts of games: word games, grid games, singing, dancing, talking, joking, laughing, willingly making fools of ourselves, and generally having a good time.

Behind all the fun, however, there were important principles, existential questions, “meaning-of-life” situations, “who-am-I” and “where-am-I-going” episodes.

The better to integrate the existential questions, the creativity, and the good times, I had structured the workshop along four segments, each with its own exercises. One of the segments was called “Hyperlinking,” another “Theme & Variations.”

I had taught these segments in the past, and I had prepared the workshop’s materials ahead of time. But here’s the rub. Late in the workshop, someone asked me an eager and urgent question: “What are these exercises about? What are you trying to tell us with Hyperlinking and Theme & Variations?”

I was stumped. Suddenly I was like Wile E. Coyote when he realizes the ground under his feet isn’t there anymore, and he’s doomed to fall to his death.

My ideas, exercises, and games all start from an intuitive source, the workings of which are difficult to explain intellectually. An inkling, sometimes vague and sometimes delineated, enters my awareness . . . sometimes uninvited, sometimes beckoned by my needs or those of a student I’m working with. The inkling might include words, or might be a shape or form; the inkling might be a punchy little phrase that encapsulates a problem and proposes a solution; the inkling might be a fully structured original exercise, or a starting point for something that will unfold over days, weeks, months, or years. Often, the inkling triggers a “ha-ha!” in me, a pleasure tinged with gratitude as if I’ve just received a gift from heaven.

Yay! . . . except that the task remains of “embodying” the inkling, transforming it into a practical and useful tool that other people can employ to make a change, overcome an obstacle, or heal a pain. It isn’t enough to create the tool; people with whom you're sharing your tool need a sort of instruction manual so that they understand it all—the problem and the solution, the tool and the technique, the meaning and the importance of what they’re undertaking.

have an insight >> create a tool >> communicate clearly

When the workshop participant asked me her pointed question, I didn’t know what to say, as my inkling hadn't finished coalescing into an unequivocal form. Falling to the ground in front of ten students, ten paying customers with needs, wants, and expectations, I underwent multiple emotions in a matter of seconds. “But I thought it was all perfectly clear!” “But I thought we were having a good time!” “Don’t you love me anymore?” “Wait, you’re right—good question!” “I don’t know the answer!” “Someone, help me!”

And, seconds into my descent, I received help, and I started talking, or someone in the inner stratosphere started talking through me. There was some babbling to begin with, then I—-he, she, ze, Zeus!—spoke. “Theme & Variations symbolically means to get your mind to stay where it is. Hyperlinking symbolically means to let your mind go somewhere.”

I hadn’t thought of this formulation before. All of a sudden I crystallized information that I knew and didn’t know, that I understood and didn’t understand, that I embodied and didn’t embody. Thanks to the whole situation, thanks to the question and the tone of voice in which it was asked, thanks to timing and circumstance I arrived at a moment of clarity. And my student “got it” in a flash.

You can only do so much preparation; you can only control your life so much; you can only think so much before something other than thinking clicks in. Yes, it can be very uncomfortable to not know, and to not control a process or its outcome! . . . particularly in a public and professional setting. But, ultimately, what would you prefer: barren certainty or fertile uncertainty? It's worth falling (or, better still, jumping!) to the bottom of Monument Valley to find out.

©Pedro de Alcantara, 2018

Watch Wile E. Coyote flying suit GIF by sickbrain on Gfycat. Discover more elderscrollsonline GIFs on Gfycat.

Nostrils, Sacred & Profane

A few years ago, my wife Alexis and I attended a performance of a troupe called The New Vietnam Circus. Trapeze artists, dancers, and musicians from Vietnam wove a tapestry of sight and sound, inspired by the mythical power of the bamboo. It was unforgettable and beautiful and strange and perfect.

After the performance, I bought a couple of . . . of what I thought were knick-knacks at the theater store: a ten-euro bamboo flute, and a five-euro nose flute. Toys; cute objects; mementos from the evening. “Nothings.” But I was wrong in my assessment of their worth.

This is my nose flute. The Obama bobblehead is there only because I really, really miss Obama.

I put the nose flute aside and didn’t think much about it. Then, roaming YouTube the other day, I came across a clip of a jokey but affecting performance of the song “Africa” by two people playing ukuleles and blowing on plastic nose flutes, which they attached to their faces with rubber bands.

I felt I needed to educate myself a bit on the nose flute. I discovered that there exist many types and models, and many aesthetics. The ukulele-playing girl has developed an impressive set of nose-flute skills, and she has a devoted following on YouTube. She calls herself the NoseFluter. Her partner on the “Africa” clip does his own thing, too, clever and touching.

But here’s the thing. Watching these skillful silly skits employing the nose flute, I surmised that there must a different dimension, a secret and deeper reason for the nose flute to exist and for people to become involved with it. And I found it, deeply embodied in this Vietnamese woman.

Played in this manner, the nose flute requires poise, breath control, a connection with the Creative Source, an inner discipline. Through the nose flute, the ego might possibly disappear, allowing the Self to emerge. Silly skits are the profane manifestation of something that exists in the divine realm, connected with Nature, timeless and eternal.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favor of the profane, which is a necessary counterpart to the sacred. Plus, I’m not saying that something is either sacred or profane. The yes/no switch doesn’t apply to metaphysical matters! Plus plus, I’m not saying I even know what those big words mean: sacred, profane, the ego, the Self, the Creative Source . . . no. I can’t begin to define them. Instead, here I’m simply posting my own modest contribution to the Nose Flute canon, and I offer my clip as my “Happy 2018” to one and all. Let the New Year bring you Two Nostrils, one sacred and one profane!

©2018, Pedro de Alcantara

The Technicians

What is technique?

I suggest that technique is the shape you give to a thought, which is the shape you give to an emotion, which is the shape you give to an indescribable insight you gathered in a place far away.

Go to the place far away; experience its terrors and delights; then come back to the material world to share with us what you learned. Your technique will unfold organically.

Watch and enjoy!

Uploaded by Evan Shelley on 2013-01-28.

If there is any problem with the copyrights, tell me and I will take down this video immediately. https://www.facebook.com/ClassicalGuitarVideo

Uploaded by Gnawalux Brussels on 2015-02-04.

Kala Ramnath presented a stunning version of Raag Shuddh Kalyan as her opening piece at FEA's Gayatri Festival 2016. She was accompanied on tabla by the brilliant Pt. Yogesh Samsi whose subtle and tasteful interplay with Kala's violin virtuosity is to be seen and heard to be believed.

What is it all about?

This blog post isn’t about the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, but let’s stay with him for a little while.

If you decide to read Stevenson’s biography on Wikipedia, you’ll marvel at what an interesting, bizarre, and marvelous life Stevenson had. Among his great achievements, Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a novella about a man with a split personality, Dr Jekyll the kind physician and Mr Hyde the psychotic murderer, health and disease inhabiting the same person. The novella is also known as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or simply Jekyll & Hyde. Movies, plays, adaptations, translations, and suchlike have kept Jekyll & Hyde alive and well since its publication in 1886.

The best Jekyll and Hyde transformation scene. Eat your heart out CGI. Special Effects were better 80 years ago!

Jekyll & Hyde speaks to us because it speaks about us. Inside all of us there’s a pull between two personality complexes, one aggressive and the other loving, one tidy and the other incoherent, one hopeful and the other desperate, one celebrating life and the other pointing toward death. You’re calm and intelligent as you pursue some little task at your desk, when you accidentally drop some coffee on your computer. And, ka-boom! You’re crazed with anger and resentment, and ready to murder someone.

This blog post isn’t about the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Born in Romania in 1876, Brancusi spent most of his working life in France, where he died in 1957. His long and creative life is hard to encapsulate in a few words, but we’ll say he was a pioneer of abstract sculpture. Instead of depicting generals riding their war horses, he depicted . . . whoa! Brancusi just arose from the grave and got mad at me.

There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call "abstract" is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.

If you’d like to spend an hour in Brancusi’s company, watch this YouTube video.

Un film de o oră, care compilează numeroase filmări cu sculptorul român Constantin Brâncuşi. Filmul, care conţine imagini de mare valoare istorică, îl arată pe Brâncuşi la lucru, unele dintre capodoperele acestuia fiind filmate în stadiul de construcţie.

But if you only have a second, here’s one of his beautiful works.

Brancusi once said this:

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

When Stevenson heard this, he smiled and agreed. This is what he said:

Things aren’t difficult to make; what is difficult is to keep your inner Hyde at bay and let your inner Jekyll help you take care of business.

The business might be learning a skill, filing your taxes, passing an exam, making dinner, or crossing the street. Hyde runs into traffic, or doesn’t see the bicycle coming at him, or trips an old lady, or rushes into a pothole and twists his ankle, and gets really pissed off about it. Jekyll crosses the street, and that’s that. It’s a whole other approach.

Let's watch the transformation in reverse: Hyde becoming Jekyll. It takes a tremendous effort of the conscious will.

To become Mr. Hyde is easy for most of us. But it takes a lot of effort to become Dr. Jekyll.

Make a distinction between “the thing” and “the thing before the thing,” or between the task and the frame of mind, or between results and processes. For instance, you don’t learn a foreign language; instead, you “learn how to learn a foreign language.” It’s relatively difficult to learn how to learn a foreign language, but once you’ve done that, learning a foreign language or three is easy!

What triggers your inner Hyde? Judgment, expectations, assumptions, suppositions, guilt and shame, “should” and “should not,” voices that you hear in your head.

What allows you to access your inner Jekyll? The absence of “should” and “should not,” be they whispered or shouted.

And this blog post isn’t about Georges Braque, the great painter who—among other accomplishments—developed Cubism with Pablo Picasso. Braque heard us talk about Stevenson and Brancusi, and he got excited.

I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one reaches this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence. . . .  Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.

What on earth does this mean? Empty your mind; silence the voices; then you’ll be in a state where you can make things, do things, learn things, enjoy things, love things. Ah, and people, too; you’ll love people.

(This blog post is about love. End of story!)

The waterwheel

I’ve been thinking about the flow of creativity and how best to manage it. I recently finished a big project, a book of music pedagogy titled The Integrated String Player. Besides writing the book, I wrote out many music scores using music-notation software, and I recorded 80 video clips explaining and demonstrating the book’s exercises. I spent several years on this project, which is being published later in 2017 by Oxford University Press.

Warning: I’m about to say something really strange! . . . but it's the secret of creativity and its flow.

I’m not proud that I finished the project, and that it was accepted for publication.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a happy man.

The waterwheel might explain my thinking. A brook runs in the middle of a farm. The farmer builds a waterwheel and installs it along the brook. As tall as a human being, the wheel contains a large number of blades strategically designed to capture the flow of the brook, turn the wheel, and create energy for running a flour mill. And the flour from the mill will in due course become nourishment for many people.

Individual events in your life are like the blades in the waterwheel, capturing the flow from running water and creating energy. Although every blade plays a role, no blade is more important than any other blade. And the blades are part of a larger mechanism that includes the wheel, the mill, the farm, and above all the brook or creek or river—without which the waterwheel wouldn’t work at all. Flow, energy, and their transformative power are more important than the blades.

My book project took several years of thought and effort. At the same time that I worked on it, I taught hundreds of lessons and workshops, traveled to many destinations, wrote monthly blog posts, gave recitals, improvised and composed new pieces, recorded a CD, recorded and posted multiple video clips, went out on hundreds of little dates with my wife . . . the list could go on indefinitely. The waterwheel was forever turning, and “new water” was forever pushing “old water” out of the way.

Your life is unlike mine in its practical details, but it’s like mine in that it encompasses dozens and hundreds and thousands of individual events, taking place day by day and week by week. A professional or academic commitment unfolds with its own rhythms, and at the same time you raise your children or go the dentist or write emails or make phone calls or . . . the list could go on indefinitely. Old water, new water; it never stops.

On the week I made my final submission to Oxford University Press, I gave lessons to some amazingly talented and dedicated individuals: Eli, a singer with a big heart and a brilliant mind; Skylin, a delightful, disciplined singer whose voice is so sweet that to hear a single note from her makes you forget all your worries; Florence, Stéphane, Andranik, Elisabeth, Mechthilde, Serge, each one bringing a world of wonders into my life. I took a piano lesson with my beloved teacher Alexandre, and for ninety minutes we delved into the intricacies of J. S. Bach’s Two-part Invention in B-flat major, a short composition that happens to be divinely perfect.

I recorded one of my little voice clips and posted it on YouTube. I went to Studio Campus (my music home, about which I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago) and practiced the cello, playing pizz and arco, singing, improvising, using the metronome, whistling, and seriously having fun. And every day I had marvelous friendly moments with my wife Alexis. Ah, I also flew from Paris to Minneapolis, where I’m now sitting at my friends’ kitchen table and writing this piece.

If the big project looms too big in my mind, it’ll interfere with all these happenings, all these explorations and discoveries.

It’s paradoxical, but the deepest pleasures come when you have a little distance from the very event that’s bringing you so many pleasures. There you are, listening to a student sing a gorgeous few notes that make you want to cry—and you’re a little detached from it, otherwise you won’t hear the next gorgeous few notes she’s about to sing. There you are, in the presence of J. S. Bach and his stunning music—and you’re a little detached from it, otherwise you’ll be too stunned to play the piano. There you are, receiving some great good news about a big project—and you’re a little detached from it, because you’re busily taking care of a thousand things. Pride, or any other strong emotion, might put a spanner in the works and prevent you from staying with the flow and, indeed, from accomplishing the project.

Plus, the whole thing isn’t about you. Ideally, the book is about concepts and tools and techniques that may be useful to your readers. Nobody wants a book’s author breathing down their necks when they’re trying to understand the ideas on the page; a book is good only if “the writer isn’t in the book,” so to speak. My readers will study The Integrated String Player when it comes out and decide for themselves whether or not I managed to disappear from its pages, but that was my goal. Life is all about “managing your disappearing act,” by which I mean dissipating your ego:

Farewell, little blade; hello, big river! Thank you for being so much bigger than me!

©2017, Pedro de Alcantara

Video by Hikeart, https://www.youtube.com/user/hikeart -- with thanks. The soundtrack is a composition of mine for cello solo, using pizzicato.

Creativity: Roots & Twigs

Many people tend to define creativity in artistic terms—having to do with painting, music, and literature, for instance.  And many people think that creativity has “techniques and standards.” On this account, people say, “I’m not creative. I can’t draw, I can’t sing.” In truth, the flow of creativity touches every human domain: the law, mathematics, politics, business, auto repair, sexuality, and everything else. A normal life entails telling jokes, solving problems, raising kids, and cheating on your taxes—creative endeavors, one and all. If you’re alive, you’re creative.

Techniques and standards aren’t intrinsic to creativity itself. They arise after the fact, so to speak. Creativity is an unstoppable process or life force that knows no standards or judgments. You can train yourself to direct this life force toward concrete goals that require specific techniques and that will be enjoyed by other people according to shared standards. But, to begin with, all you need is to engage in the process—to ride the life force, so to speak.

I started my adult life as a cellist, playing classical music. This entailed studying and performing canonic compositions written by other people in centuries long past. In common with most classical musicians, I became so involved with goals, techniques, standards, and judgments that my music making wasn’t actually creative. Creativity is like a tree, deeply rooted and growing immensely broad and high, with numberless branches and infinite leaves. Music is a branch of creativity; classical music a sub-branch; the cello as played in classical music a smaller branch still, nothing but a twig in the huge tree; and each adult cellist playing classical music is a bud, or leaf, or flower at the tip of a twig. As long as you’re still connected to the creative roots, to blossom at the tip of a twig is wonderful. But as a cellist, I plucked myself off the creative tree and became, in a word, dead: the dry, broken-off tip of a twig.

Over the years, I worked through these issues and managed to reconnect with the creative life force. This required that I give up my identity as a “cellist” (that is, as a twig). I had to let go of my technical standards, my narrowly defined aesthetic and professional goals, my judgments, my desire to please other people, and many other things that defined me as an individual. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. But, hey, I found my way back to the roots of creativity.

Musically, my “not being a cellist” allowed me to become an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer. My current music is kind of tribal, primeval and beautiful, quasi-shamanic. It takes listeners on some far-out head trips. My “not being a cellist” allowed me to become a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, publishing a new book every two or three years and getting translated into French, German, Japanese, and Estonian. My “not being a cellist” allowed me to become a teacher, coach, and (to use a big word) healer, with a practice spanning the globe. My “not being a cellist” also allowed me to explore the visual arts, in particular drawing, photography, and video. In this article I want to touch upon photography as a creative outlet.

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You get a lot done when you connect to the roots of creativity. If you’re open-minded and grounded, small efforts yield substantial results. So far, my photography has depended on a $300 compact camera, of which I use almost exclusively the automatic settings; the Mac’s photo editing program, iPhoto; an iPad Mini; and a free editing app called Snapseed. I used my iPad Mini to take all photos illustrating this article; I edited some of them with Snapseed.

Photography is a collaboration of many players: your eyes, brain, and heart; the environment around you; equipment and software; and technical knowledge. You don’t need to move to Paris to take good photos; the whole world is infinitely and permanently photogenic, there for you to enjoy and record. People have taken meaningful, touching photos of their kitchenware. And although it’s very tempting to think that technique and equipment are important, they’re secondary to your “working on yourself,” so to speak: being willing to take risks big and small, being willing to look, think, and snap the photo, without prejudging the results of the snap or worrying about what other people think of your creative efforts.

Every photo you take is a self-portrait—that is, a portrait of your own perspective, your choices and priorities. At a street corner there are so many details, so many things happening at the same time that thousands of different images could be taken in any one moment. But you take the one photo that you alone will take. Your presence in that street corner, your eyes and brain, your life experiences up to that moment determine your photo. As I see it, this is the core of photography: the “you” behind the camera.

An iPad Mini is as good as any other piece of equipment to get you going, since the one thing that matters at first is for you to be willing to be present and to shoot the image. After you take a photo, or a dozen, or a hundred, you can go home and look some more, think some more, play some more. The Snapseed app is elegantly designed. In a minute you’ll know how to use it. And in two minutes you’ll discover that your original image can transform itself in multiple ways. It’s a bit foolish to think that a photo “must be true to reality.” Reality is so multidimensional that no photo can be true to it. Every choice you make as you take a photo—the where, the what, the when, the who, the how much—filters and alters reality in some way. Post-shoot, editing an image only continues the inevitable filtering process. Paradoxically, a good photo might capture some essential corner of reality and be true to it even as it filters and alters it in multiple ways.

Technique is partly a matter of absorbing information and practicing skills—with or without the help of a teacher—and partly a matter of learning from experience. Spend a couple of hours taking photos every week, and over two years you’ll take ten thousand photos in two hundred different settings. This gives you enough of a database to start exercising your discernment and making faster, deeper choices at the very moment of taking a photo. Ultimately, awareness is the one thing that counts the most. If you define technique as “trained awareness,” the pursuit of technique will become very enriching.

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