THE BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT

All learning is a journey from a state of unknowing to a state of knowing.

You move from one state to the other in a breakthrough moment.

In that instant, you gain a flash of insight into your task.

Everything becomes clear to you.

You know exactly how to effect your desired results.

Once you experience the breakthrough moment, you enter into a world of unlimited possibilities.

Your actions flow from one step to the next in a smooth seamless flow.

Whereas previously you had to think about every move you made, now they occur spontaneously and without conscious effort.

Whereas previously your mind was filled with anxiety about your task, now you move with confidence and clarity.

Your confidence enables you to navigate your way through the most complex tasks with effortless control.

You’re able to achieve any speed.

Generate any power you need.

Hit any target you want.

—Oct. 27, 2009

The Wabi Sabi Guitar

I have been reading up on wabi-sabi, or the Japanese art of imperfection.

It is interesting that the wabi-sabi philosophy emerged in Japan, one of the most structured and, if I may say so, perfection-driven societies in the world.

It would never have come from the jungles of Borneo, for instance, because it’s pretty much all wabi-sabi there.

I first became aware of wabi-sabi from one of those glossy flight magazines and the concept immediately caught on to me.

After all, I have been trying to teach the concept of embracing imperfections in our performances to my students for a while, and here’s a philosophy that seems to mirror that concept.

In a way, we have become a perfection-driven society too.

And we see it in the trappings of modern life—the perfection of a brand new automobile, a brand new appliance, a brand new iPod.

There’s a uniformity about all these products, a sameness. But that’s perfection. Perfection means that there is an ideal state which we must all aspire to.

All our manufactured products conform to that ideal. There must not be a single scratch, or one deviation from that ideal. And if there’s any ‘deviation,’ we cast the “defective” product aside and sell it in outlet stores as being “irregular.”

In this regard, perfection is the very antithesis of creativity.

Creativity presupposes that what we create is new and unique and original, but if there’s only one ideal state of perfection, we are doomed to recreating it every time we try to be perfect.

Perfection turns us all into rubber stamps!

The perfection around us has given a false sense of what life is all about.

Instead of striving to make each moment a unique experience and enjoying it in all its unexpectedness and yes, imperfections, we end up always comparing it to some idealized state.

The result is we all become neurotics. We become slaves to some figment of our imagination called ‘perfection.’

Every thing else is defective and not worthy!

—Jan 27, 2005

The Seeker

Driven by a certain restlessness and a need for fulfillment.

Lives to perfect his art.

No distinction between work or play—work is play and play is work.

Not concerned with ‘correctness’ or ‘wrongness.’ There are only easier and harder ways to do a task, and easier is usually better.

Sees no horizon, only the road ahead.

Needs no approval.

Speaks no evil, no accolades.

A doer, not a bystander.

Does not own a hundred tools; owns only one and knows it intimately.

Keeps an open heart.

Trusts intuition, understanding the subconscious mind is far wiser than the conscious mind.

Sees the limits of possibilities but also knows that great things happen on the edge.

Uninhibited—his way is the way of spontaneous abandon.

Does not live for the moment—how can you live in the moment when it is over the instant it arrives?

Instead, lives for the next moment, always ready for the next wave.

Moving to an inner rhythm—each motion, each gesture tethered to an internal pulse.

In a life of constant forward motion.

—Jan 5, 2007

Knowing when to stop or knowing your limits.

There’s a breaking point in everything.

Full of examples in daily life of the consequences of pushing beyond your limits and over doing.

Take driving a screw.

When you drive a screw, you must know when to stop.

Drive it beyond this point and you strip the wood. Don’t drive it enough and it doesn’t hold.

Know when to stop—push it just enough and no more.

—April 10, 2003

Early notes for the AOV.

To accomplish your objectives, apply 7 movement principles and 6 strategies:

First, establish a strong and stable foundation to operate in.

Next, develop a light and relaxed technique based on three principles of soft body, light touch, and tension-release.

Control your movements with a light rhythmic pulse.

Move smoothly and fluidly.

Automate your actions so you can perform unconsciously.

6 Strategies:

Simplicity: Reduce things down to simplest elements.

Naturalness: Work with your body. Do not fight or stifle it with rules and artificiality.

Accommodate and minimize conflicts.

Leverage: Generate power and speed from your interactions.

Emotion: Drive your actions forward with focus.

Spontaneity: Respond quickly to every exigency with finesse (otherwise known as winging it).

—June 2, 2003

The Concept of Structural Delineation

And so it is not uncommon to hear recordings of the Chaconne where the beginning and the ending sound almost identical in intensity.

Beginnings and endings must be differentiated.

Especially in material that is similar.

A beginning must sound like a beginning and an ending an ending.

Like a good movie, you know when it’s the end, even before the credits have started rolling.

How do you know?

Because there’s a sense of conclusion, a sense of resolution, a sense of finality.

After a long conflict ridden saga, the end comes as a relief, a wrapping up of things.

Especially for long scale works, structures should be articulated in the same way as melodies. The beginnings, the middle, and the endings should all be differentiated.

This differentiation can be done at all the basic levels—dynamics, timbre, and articulation.

—May 18, 2003

First installment of random notes penned a while back, finally seeing the light of day.

One of the recent developments in guitar has been this movement to sanitize it. And so new codes of ‘clean playing’ have been drawn up. Certain tone colors are declared verboten.

The end result of this has been an increasing tendency towards limpid playing—endless soft mellow strumming on strings which gives new meaning to the word ‘monotone.’

I ask myself in the face of all these innovations and ‘refinements’ – Where is the passion? Where is the fire? Where is the energy? Is music only meant to sound this way—clean, sanitized, mellow?

If this is progress, I would rather remain in the dark ages where music is supposed to say something, where passion and fire is synonymous with the guitar. One note from Segovia is worth more than all the notes from these ‘born again’ exponents of the sanitized guitar put together.

A personal aside—It has become fashionable in some quarters to attack Segovia and his legacy as idiosyncratic and antiquated.

My own philosophy has always been—here’s a guy who single-handedly resurrected an obsolete instrument, put it on the concert map, established an entire generation of great players and played into his nineties.

Is there any one who can claim to have accomplished half as much?

Rather than criticize him, perhaps we should stand back and try to understand not just why he was such a phenomenon, but how he developed such a fluid and effortless technique.

—May 11, 2003

Unlike the Bach CD, my Chopin CD was recorded in a small studio and close-miked. Close-miking has its advantages, but it also has some disadvantages including a certain boominess in the bass. Since its release, I have always felt that the recordings need a little tweaking sonically. Last year, I managed to locate the original 24-bit files and was able to get John Strother of Penguin recordings to remaster them.

Here is the remastered version of track 4 on the CD, Chopin Nocturne No. 5, Op. 15, No. 2.