Improvise, from the Latin: in (without), pro (before), vis (sight). To work with what you cannot see in advance. Not jazz. Not being clever on the spot. Just meeting what's actually here, now, without a script for it. Which, if we're honest, is every moment there is.
If you'd like some company practicing that, whatever instrument is in your house, start at the Listening Door. The rest of this post is about why the instrument sits there, and what to do about it that doesn't involve trying harder.
The instrument you walk past
You know the piano in the front room. Or the drum by the chair. The one you pass on the way to the kitchen.
You look at it. You don't touch it. Not today. And then it's midnight, you're in bed, and it's tomorrow again.
I hear versions of this all the time. "I sit here and I look at my piano, but I don't touch it." "I don't want to play yet. And then all of a sudden it's midnight." And I say versions of it myself. I avoid this practice like crazy sometimes, and I do it for a living. It's not that I don't like doing it. I love doing it. I just don't like starting it.
So this isn't a post about discipline. I don't think discipline is the problem. I think two other things are, and one hides inside the other.
The front burner
The first reason is just life.
Work runs past its edges. Family needs you in three directions at once. The world outside is tense and complicated and, let's be honest, weird, and it shows up on your phone before breakfast. And inside there's this steady pressure to hold boundaries you never really had time to build in the first place.
Sometimes it's the stress. Sometimes it's the pressure. Sometimes it's just the sheer weirdness of everything.
Against all that, a piano or a drum looks pretty peripheral. Extracurricular. Nice, sure. But no help with anything that's actually on the front burner.
So it stays untouched. Reasonably. I'm not going to argue you out of that. Yet.
The quieter reason
The second reason lives inside the first.
A voice shows up before the first note. You know the one. It already graded the last time you sat down. It's grading this time before you've played anything.
Here's what I've noticed about that voice, in myself and in a lot of the people I work with. It shows up even when there was no mistake.
Ever have a whole open Saturday, nothing scheduled, and you didn't go near the instrument? And the voice says: "Of course you didn't." Nothing happened. There was nothing to grade. It graded anyway.
So I propose it was never really about your mistakes. If it were about mistakes, it would have nothing to say about an empty Saturday. It's registering something else. I think it's registering a gap in timing: the gap between what's happening right now and how ready we feel to meet it right now.
And that gap has a name. Nobody taught you how to improvise.
We were taught to know before we play. Learn the scale, learn the song, get it right, and then you're allowed. That's a real way to learn music and I don't knock it. But it teaches one thing and quietly leaves another one out. Nobody taught most of us to sit down and work with what's actually here, without seeing it in advance.
That's a skill. It's learnable. At any age, at any level. And it happens to be the exact skill the front burner has been demanding of you all day, at a speed no plan can keep up with. Every conversation. Every decision. What's happening now? Who am I now? What do I do now?
Which means the peripheral instrument in your front room turns out to be the one place in the house that was built for practicing the thing the front burner asks for.
It's autumn, by the way
One more thing before the practice.
It's mid-August. In the old Celtic calendar, autumn has already begun. And autumn is not the season for starting seven new things. Everything outside is finishing what it started. Fields cut. Fruit dropping. It's the season of keeping what nourishes you and letting the rest go.
Which makes it a very good season to walk over to the thing you've been walking past. Not to add it to the pile. To finish a sentence that's been sitting open.
The instrument as a mirror
Here's what I'd offer, and it's small on purpose.
That instrument isn't a test. It's a mirror. It gives back exactly what you put into it. No more, no less. Which means you don't sit down to play something. You sit down to hear what's there.
Walk over. Piano, drum, whatever's in the room. Don't decide what to play. Put a hand down and listen to what comes back. Make whatever sounds you feel like making, one at a time, and let each one finish before the next one asks to arrive. That last part is the only autumn touch: not a rule about how many notes, just where the listening goes. A sound that's allowed to end.
Three minutes is plenty. Ten if you feel like it.
Then notice: the critic doesn't have much to say about a sound you let finish. It needs a mistake to grade. There isn't one here. There's just what came back.
That's the whole practice. It won't fix the front burner. But it does something the front burner can't: it lets you practice meeting what's here, right now, in a place where nothing is at stake, so that the meeting gets a little easier everywhere else.
The question I'll leave you with
Autumn asks a question, and I'd rather leave it with you than answer it for you.
Are you willing to stand behind what you made? Even one sound? Even a slightly weird one?
I don't know your answer. I'm still working on mine most days.
You should never live in exile from your nature. And I don't think you have to. Walk over to it this week.
If you'd like company doing this, the Listening Door is where the practice starts, whatever your instrument. If you already know which one is sitting in your front room, there's a piano door and a drum door too. And if you want the longer argument about why timing, not knowledge, is the thing most of us are short on, that's here.
Listen, feel, and play on.
Comments