GAINS (the Global Association for Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies) recently published an article on \u201cBeing Playful in\u00a0 Left Brain World.\u201d\u00a0 It was beautifully written and inspired me to reflect on some of my own struggles with left-right integration.<\/p>\n
It started when I was 4 (well, not exactly, but I\u2019ll get there).\u00a0 My older sister and brother had each taken accordion lessons and \u2013 to put it mildly \u2013 didn\u2019t like it.\u00a0 I guess I was too young to realize just how uncool the accordion was. My sister taught me to read music and I fell in love with it. I used to love to walk around the house playing various bad renditions of current pop tunes. There was also, quite strangely, a deep nostalgia that was evoked by the many tunes I played from the late 1800s \u2013 I sometimes sat on the milkbox on the back porch and played them at dusk, enjoying the echoing music across the various suburban yards.<\/p>\n
When I was 11, my teacher gave me a \u201cboogie-woogie\u201d to learn \u2013 I thought to myself, \u201cThis is such a simple form of music\u201d and for the first time, \u201cwrote\u201d my own piece of music. I put \u201cwrote\u201d in quotes because it just kind of rolled out; I didn\u2019t have to think about the \u2018rules\u201d of composition at all.<\/p>\n
The second piece also just emerged. Looking back at it, I still wonder where it came from.\u00a0 It was at 11 that I discovered our family had Jewish roots (we grew up in a nondescript Unitarian church, utterly secularized and almost wholly left-brained). Years later, I played the piece for a Russian Jewish friend, who told me the music sounded just like a Russian Jewish folk song.<\/p>\n
I experimented with a lot of different styles the next few years \u2013 I went through a \u201cDave Brubeck\u201d style, a \u201cBeatles\u201d style (in fact, in my first year at Juilliard, I knew harmony much better than most of my classmates, who all tried to \u201cfigure out\u201d how to hear harmonies, whereas I and my music-playing friends from high school \u2013 most of whom didn\u2019t\u2019 know how to read music – just became familiar with the flow of chords from listening to the Beatles and other rock music at the time).<\/p>\n
When I was 16, I decided to go to music school. I thought of majoring in piano, but my piano teacher knew I wasn\u2019t good enough, so he encouraged me to aim to be a composition major.\u00a0 I took the next year off from high school to study music full time, and started studying composition and music theory with Hall Overton, a professor at Juilliard.<\/p>\n
I was in a Prokofiev\/Bartok phase at the time, and loved playing around with their biting dissonances and wild polyrhythms. I actually managed to sketch out one of these playful improvisations, and Mr. Overton was impressed enough with it that he encouraged me to work it out into a full composition.<\/p>\n
Here is where my struggle \u2013 no, left-right warfare \u2013 began.\u00a0 I could sit at the piano for hours and play around with really interesting variations, but there was not much logic or structure to it. And there was definitely a certain fascination with trying out the various techniques that Mr. Overton taught me to vary the intervals, to develop motifs, to carefully structure the harmonies so the harmonic progression made logical sense.<\/p>\n
But the more I focused on playing, the less logical structure there was.<\/p>\n
And the more I focused on logical structure, the more lifeless and flat the music became.<\/p>\n
I spent 4 months struggling with this and had not a clue how to bring these together.\u00a0 Meanwhile, I continued to have great fun learning Chopin Etudes and Debussy Preludes, as well as various composition techniques from the sonata to the rondo and fugue. I enjoyed very much learning about the intensely logical structure and magic of Bach Fugues. In fact, I recall\u00a0 lesson with Israeli composer Nahum Amir.<\/p>\n
We spent 1 hour on the first measure of a Bach Prelude. It was basically 2 chords and an incredibly simple melody.<\/p>\n
One hour!<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t think I ever experienced it so clearly before \u2013 I discovered that the extremely refined, clear, focused logical understanding of the structure was not only not<\/i> in opposition to the appreciation of the beauty of the music.\u00a0 It intensely increased my feeling for the flow, my sense of the grandeur and magnificent architecture of this simplest of bars of music.<\/p>\n
But still, this didn\u2019t translate into a solution for my composition.<\/p>\n
Then one day, some time around the 5th<\/sup> or 6th<\/sup> month of struggle, something happened. I had previously managed to compose \u2013 with some meager combination of logical structure and artistic beauty \u2013 a page or two of the piece, but after that had been completely stuck.<\/p>\n I wouldn\u2019t quite say I went into a trance, but I definitely remember the entire atmosphere changed around me.\u00a0 It was almost as though some force took over my mind and my hands, and the music just wrote itself. More than a page \u2013 perhaps 18 or 19 bars. And this was very complex music, not rooted in any particular key, with many dissonances and odd polyrhythms. I am sure I didn\u2019t consciously \u201cunderstand\u201d the harmonic progressions, and yet, when I took the piece to Mr. Overton, he was amazed, as each note made sense, and the logic of the flow was impeccable.<\/p>\n So I knew it could be done. I\u2019d like to say that after that, composition was a breeze, but I\u2019m afraid it was rarely that easy. I struggled through several years as a composition major, first at Juilliard then at Manhattan School of Music. Finally, I switched to piano major \u2013 unable to integrate left and right mode, I opted for letting go of my mind altogether, and just enjoying the play.<\/p>\n **********<\/p>\n Interestingly, I spent most of my time as a musician \u2013 through my 20s and 30s \u2013 working with dancers.\u00a0 Somehow, having the choreographed structure of a dance piece or collection of dance movements satisfied my left-brain need to create an orderly, logical sequence of notes, yet left me free to play. I rarely had even the slightest clue what I was going to play when the instructor was counting off. I\u2019d hear, \u201c5, and 6, and 7, and 8 AND\u2026 ”<\/p>\n And apart from deciding I would start with a G, or perhaps an A minor chord, or maybe a tritone interval, my hands just took over, yet another part of my mind was fully aware of the structure within which I had to create the music.<\/p>\n *************<\/p>\n