Learning Music - Part II (Feeling to learn)

Now, no one can be taught to feel. That’s impossible. However, there is a roundabout way of getting there and that is by practicing love. And I don’t mean the crack-cocaine version of love that has spawned the book, film, poetry and quotable quotes industries but the real thing – altruistic love or loving kindness or metta. The Buddha is very specific on this point: “Practice loving kindness oh monks. One becomes clever by doing so”. Of course, he doesn’t use the word “clever”. Instead, he uses the word “Buddhi” stemming from the word “avabuddhi or avabodha” or internalizing or (you got it) - knowing.

Metta leads to feeling leads to knowing.

So, it doesn’t take much to figure out that by engaging everything and everyone with equal, unreflecting love, one acquires deep, insightful sensitization to the subtleties of their existence and from those stem the initial asha or desire to be one, or become one with one’s object of focus at any given point.For the purpose of this piece, those would be musical instruments and how they can be loved and how they can reward that love with the music they make with one and on behalf of one.

Yet, desire is not sufficient although it must form the basis of any instrument you wish to play. You need the discipline, the exercise, the peer engagement. Those are provided by the guru and the choice of the guru is crucial to progress. The Guru can be a) a physical human being, b) a book or c) experience. A person works best, a book is next and experience a poor last (one needs to bump one’s head on the lintel a few dozen times before one realizes that one is an inch taller than the lintel).

Gurus do not happen by chance. They become a student’s guru, because a student feels sufficiency in desire. Many students make the mistake of going for instruction to a great guru (and paying through their parent’s noses for it) believing that excellence is a necessary outcome of surface association. Not so. Teachers might “learn” you an instrument but gurus don’t. Gurus won’t. Gurus can’t. Regardless of what you pay such a one, if a guru sees no sufficiency in desire, she will merely teach you well. Remember therefore that even if you consider such a one your guru, the guru won’t consider you his disciple as Musila found out to his detriment. 

Now, a lot of people, mistaking greed for need, lust for desire, thanha for asha, believe that learning is a process of acquiring something one lacks. Actually, it is the collateral outcome of a tripartite association, an engagement, a fornication if you may - between a student, a teacher and an instrument. In Asian traditions - all the way from what is now knows as the mid-east, through central and south Asia to the far east, students humble themselves and bow before both the teacher and the instrument for without such devotion and humility neither will look their way nor feel for them nor feel with them. Contrasting with the arrogance of the present day “student” and “teacher” where it is all “me” and “you”, all big or small, all hit or miss, the best of students finds the greatest of teachers every time and seek merely to pay homage at their feet. All else that follows is incidental.

And that which is incidental is a factor of a student’s own sufficiency and rises from the three-way associative engagement mentioned above. If you are sufficient, then you would already know what I am about to tell you. You will go to a teacher for six different types of sansarga (copulation/engagement). Drushti or sight tsansarga (this is first and one goes to a teacher merely to be thrilled by the sight of him, the voice of him, the way of him, the perfume of him). Next, Shabdha or sound sansarga (you have graduated to actually hearing what she has to say). Next, Ghanda or iva or olfactory sansarga (you instinctively know what he is going to say before he says it since you are now capable of literally and figuratively smelling him). Next, Kabali or taste sansarga (you go to her to be fed, clothed, sheltered and to bind your rasa to hers). Next, sparsha or touch sansarga (you need to physically copulate at which point the teacher gives of her own blood to the disciple) and finally, chiththa or mental sansarga (the two are physically removed from each other, but the disciple only needs to think of the guru and will instantly obtain the solution to any problem that vexes her).  

Truly, then, you know what you have studied with the guru. Truly you will believe, as Barenboim tells the young Lang Lang, that you can create a crescendo on a single note although in theory that is impossible. Truly you will believe, as Horowitz told the 14 year old Berenboim to believe - in the power of the will of a knowing musician. Truly you will know, not the clinical mastery of speed play nor the beauty of subtle ornamentation nor the technical wizardry of tricking out - and tripping up - the metronome but of the force in you, the sensor, the knower, the seer, to unlock the potency – and the poesy - of a single note. 

Learning music - Part I

We were young then. My friend Nishadh and I. He was a mere esraj visharadha at the time and I was merely a guitar player. Decades before musical fusion became a distasteful fad, the two of us would interleave the sounds of the esraj and the guitar because their tonal qualities and auditory outputs seem to fit well together – especially if the players were soused in alcohol. 

Although both of us were classical exponents, at those times, we would play the lighter pieces together. That night, we were at the tail end of an hours-long session of tunes fueled by booze that in turn was fueled by harmonies when Nishadh played the opening notes of “Muhudu pathula” the famous song from “Muhudu Puththu”.  I promptly plucked out a compliment in C minor. At one point in that exposition, Nishadh reached out to the higher C and did something with that note that I thought was impossible to do with the esraj. He seems to create the illusion of actually playing the C, C sharp and B (C flat - in eastern music there is a universe of difference between B and C flat) all at the same time, magically transforming the entire flavor of the tune. I almost dropped my guitar in shock but still had enough presence of mind to indicate that he should repeat it. As he redid his bit of musical skulduggery I changed the guitar response into a rapid mix of B to C bends and c to C sharp hammer ons on the A5 string interspersed with open E6 staccatos with the effect achieved by stopping it with the chiquito on the 5^th to get the E harmonic to ring out. It was his turn to be astounded. As it ended, I burst, “what you just did machan… that… is the mark of an ustad”. He says, “… and your trick completed it… that… is the mark of a master”.

Afterwards we were quiet for a long time, just cradling our instruments, sipping drinks and looking out into the patch of greenery at the back of my home.  By the by he breaks the silence, almost in  soliloquy, murmuring “we can be taught to play 12 or even 16 notes a second on a string but we can never be taught to believe in the power or the possibilities of a single note. We have both been students. We are trying to be teachers now. We must always remember that we cannot teach someone to do what either of us did today. They must know it for themselves”. I murmured back, “technique can never stand-in for understanding, nor theory for practice, nor lust for love”.  We finished our drinks. The magic was both replete and complete. We put our instruments away and safely walked out of each other’s lives for the next twenty years. Such, then, is the potent energy and magic of a single note of a single song.

 It is a good story that, despite the fact that it is true. It is also a good Segway to discuss the idea of learning music or anything else for that matter. Sure we’ve all learned a thing or two as human beings and flogging this topic seems to be slightly silly because most people know what learning is without anyone having to slice, dice it or define it. Or…do they?

Well, I thought I did until I was taught, quite by chance, that I didn’t know jack about it. I learned of my inadequacy because I did something I rarely did as a teen – look up. Straight at the TV where Amaradeva was saying “to know music, you must have, in that order, asha (desire), siksha (discipline), abhbaysa (exercise), sathsanga (the company of those on the same journey as you) and guru (teacher –either a person, a book or experience). If you fail to acquire even one of those, you may learn things but never know them. If you have them, you never stop knowing and never stop expanding the types of things you gets to know”.

That was a blinding brilliant bolt that sparked into life the very sinews that bound my body together. That day I realized the difference between learning (igenuma) and knowing (danuma or danima). Learning was a clinical, mechanical, hit-some-miss-some effort whereas Knowing as Amaradeva said it required one to feel (danima). I realized that up to that point, be it chess or math or music or speech, I had been feeling nothing and merely learning so, small wonder the only feeling I had was “low” and the only way I knew how to deal with it was to keep my head buried in some novel or other. 

The tough thing is "to feel". Can it be taught? Well, no... and not no neither. :) Part II will explain.

The teaching of music

Back in the day, I would amuse people by telling them that I could teach someone to play the guitar in ten minutes. Since a lot of people mistake skill development as learning and long term oversight, adjustment and direction of coursework as teaching, their amusement is justified. They are, of course, very welcome to their understanding of teaching, and, I might add, their take on it all is a very commonly held opinion. For them, there is a very large music teaching industry that has sprung up with droves of students corralled in tastefully laid out premises choked with instruments, furniture, teachers, managers and administrators. They are welcome to put themselves or their children through years of toil and turmoil within those torture chambers that pass for music schools.

But no. That is not teaching by a long shot. A great teacher understands that there is a fundamental, critical difference between a person who wants to play an instrument and one who wants to merely learn it.

To play an instrument, one needs something more encompassing and proximate than the mere ability to create nice sounds on some weird looking contraption made of strings, keys, tubes, drums, skins or combinations of those elements. One needs to have the desire to consort with one’s instrument. One needs an untrammeled, unbounded, unreflecting joy bordering on reverence at its mere proximity. One must thrill with ecstasy at the mere chance to make some sound  - any sound - come out of it.  One must cease to see it as one’s instrument of choice and understand it as one’s object of adulation and see the potential it holds to make one whole. One must love the idea of the instrument in one’s life and one must be brave enough to think that it can become one’s whole life.

Related post: The appreciation of the classical musics

The recognition of a future disciple:

A great teacher of music knows how to recognize this desperate desire, this hopeless longing on the part of a student to love and be loved by a guitar, a sitar, a piano, a violin, a basoon, a tabla, an ektar, a flute. Such a teacher seeks that desire in his students…seeks it…seeks it…whether asleep or awake, every single moment of every single day for it is a rare thing indeed.  He hunts for it in the eyes, in the hands, in the hearts, in the minds of those who come to him for instruction.  He desperately hopes, longs, desires to see the desperation, the longing, the hope in a student. If such is found, then the teacher knows he has found a disciple and not just a student. He knows  that his cup is then made fuller by an eighth.

With pleasure and anticipation he will proceed to bring the disciple into his fold and give him shade. He will know, in the first instant of contact with such a one, exactly how he should be taught to woo his instrument. In just ten minutes he will be able to make his disciple cry out in wonder “oh my God. My God. Who would have thought that such beauty could ever fall in love with a guy like me? Who would have thought that such a gorgeous thing would allow me to embrace it and call it my own?”. Ten minutes it all it takes for a teacher to see the entire life of a disciple laid bare before him. 

The great teachers of this world subsume their egos and live only to thrill at the sight of their charges carving out a life for themselves in the company of an instrument that they too loved and married into in a different time, in a different way.

From there to the end of a never ending journey, is the joyful engagement of the teacher and the disciple living and existing for the betterment of the one. The discipline, the exercises, the special little tasks serving merely to tighten an already firm and affirmed love affair between the disciple and the instrument.  

This by no means indicates that a teacher will ignore or marginalize the rest of the students. However, with them, there will be a sort of clinical, twilight relationship. The love of a teacher would not be lesser but that teacher knows only too well the egos, the parental pushes, the peer pressures, the educational goals that drive them to class. Certainly, the teacher will instruct them. She will remove the debilitating agents and conditions be they parental zeal, indiscipline, emotional vapidity or iffy love affairs and make sure that the coursework is completed, the exams sat, the “distinctions” obtained. She will dismissively wave away the thanks with a “you did it, not me”. This is a terrible state of affairs all too common in our time but not actually a great big disaster. 

Great teachers emerge from such skirmishes relatively unscathed but bad ones? Their lot is darker. Forever debilitated by ego overdrives and personality clashes, they must suffer the psycho-emotional backlash of insisting that it has got to be their way or the highway. They must deal with violating their students' minds, hearts and bodies and being mentally and physically shot to death by them – literally and figuratively. 

The recognition of the future teacher:

Now I said that the identification of a disciple will only fill an eighth of a great teacher’s cup because, in my experience, they would be lucky to find four disciples in their lives and even if they do, their cup would only be half full. I have a reason for saying this. Even among disciples there are a rarefied few who can become teachers in their own right. These are a teacher's successors. These are the ones that every great teacher yearns for. The great ones they can never seek or want but can only pray for and wait for.

Those come neither for instruction nor for learning nor for playing. None of that is important to them. In lives past they’ve been there, done that and all of it is the merest technicality, effortlessly remembered, mastered, discarded. Only such a person can be taught to teach and not merely to play. Such a one comes filled to the brim – with emptiness. Such a one is full of the lack of desire and bursting at the seams with lack of ego. Such a one can touch an instrument - any instrument - and see in the sounds, a cocooned sampling of the entire universe. Only such a one can achieve that miraculous ability to teach because she is completely cognizant of the fact that she is empty. And empty, she gets plenty. Continuing to want only empty she can therefore distribute plenty in endless bounty.

Such a one can teach brilliantly and such a one can perform any instrument brilliantly. If by some chance, such a one graces a teacher, the teacher would take her… to feed and nurture with the teacher’s very blood. Over years, the teacher will empty herself into such a one in a way she never could with a disciple whose skill set and mindset are limited to singular relationships. Removed from relationships, there is only the certainty of union. Of such magical connects were the great gurukulas (teacher-teacher bloodlines) born in the east, especially in the centuries long aesthetic traditions of India. Such ties are not easily explained in words. Having been privy to them as a growing child, I truly know that it is impossible to unpack them casually. Those unions are complex and only fully understood by such teachers and such students.

That is why Ustad Allaudin Khan gave his school to Ustad Podiappuhamy the universally accomplished multi-instrumentalist/ singer/dancer/teacher and not to Pandit Ravi Shankar the sitar playing disciple. That is why Ravi Shankar couldn’t really impart universal absolutes to his daughter Anoushka. That is why Barenboim the conductor/pianist/activist/humanist/advocate is a teacher and Barishnikov the dancer never was and never will be. 

The myth of mushti:

This connect is rare. Many a great teacher has died and their spectral knowledge buried with them for a successor never made her existence known. Never into the teacher's orbit wondered the next in the bloodline. He had to be content with teaching disciples to do... not to teach. Of all the tragedies that a teacher must live through – and there are many – that…is the greatest. That... is the most agonizing. 

And yet, to the ego-warped idiot who senses recalcitrance on the part of a teacher to “show his all” this reluctance is seen viciously and disastrously as a “hiding of knowledge” or “mushti”. He little realizes that it is his own inadequacy that is preventing the sharing of something he is not capable of absorbing as happened to Musila in the presence of Guttila. In the modern world, with a dilution of the bloodlines of the greatest teachers of this world, the Musilas are many and the Guttilas few.