摘录自Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch
"You can replace ‘playing’ below with ‘life’, ‘Awareness Through Movement’, ‘Parenting’ or any form of art that you do, it still makes sense."
-- 泉 Quan
Playing is entirely empirical, testing its own mettle in real time. It is not a matter of theory or learning the right way to play, but of doing by doing and discovery by experiment.
As everyone who has tried playing a violin knows, the biggest problem is playing in tune. The strings have no frets or other guideposts on them to tell you where to put your fingers (sometimes we see children’s violins defaced by sticking little pieces of Scotch tape on the finger-board as markers for the so-called notes, but this beastliness only makes things worse).
by Lucy Grainge @https://www.lucygrainge.com/info
With intonation, as with every other aspect of violin playing, there is nothing to be taken for granted. Especially in the big jumps of the hand between the lowest and highest positions, it seems to be a matter of aiming and shooting at an unmarked target. Very risky. And way up there in the upper registers, if the finger is off by a fraction the sound can be quite disturbing. As a child—having been far from a prodigy—I thought that playing in perfect tune was a matter of making a lucky shot (as in pin-the-tail-on) and that playing up high on that E-string the world’s most death-defying high-wire act.
I eventually discovered that the violinist never makes those jumps at a single shot, but continuously adjusts the sound’s pitch by ear, at lightning speed. The finger doesn’t come down on the spot and stay there; it glides up and down by minute intervals, microtonally, until it matches what the ear wants to hear.
When we are flexible and sensitive, we are always sliding into base in a continuous dance of feedback, just as an athlete is always dancing around in order to meet the ball at the precise time and place.
by Lucy Grainge @https://www.lucygrainge.com/info
Our muscles can’t do this unless the fingers are soft and relaxed. If we use just enough force to press the string, it’s easy to nudge the finger up and down smoothly in tenths of a second. But if more than just enough force is used (human hands are very strong!), the finger will be temporarily glued to where it landed, and presto—you have an audible mistake.
In the science of psychophysics there is a law (the Weber-Fechner law) that relates the objective value of stimulation (a light, a sound, a touch) to its subjective value (the sensation we feel). The gist of it is that our sensitivity diminishes in proportion to the total amount of stimulation. If there are two candles lit in a room, we easily notice the difference in brightness when a third candle is lit.
by Lucy Grainge @https://www.lucygrainge.com/info
But if there are fifty candles burning, we are unlikely to notice the difference made by a fifty-first. If there is less total stimulation, each small change makes more of a difference, or in Gregory Bateson’s phrase, it’s a difference that makes a difference. Against a background that is quiet and stress-free, subtle sounds and movements can have a very dramatic effect.
That is why the best form of ear-cleaning is to spend a month in the country, away from loud machine noises, crowds, and traffic. Each day, as the ear gradually recovers some of its primeval power, we begin to hear more and more.
The same is true of the kinesthetic sense. The harder we press on a violin string, the less we can feel it. The louder we play, the less we hear. The more relaxed and ready the muscles are, the more different ways they can move.
by Lucy Grainge @https://www.lucygrainge.com/info
The method is to free up the hands, arms, shoulders, every part of the body, making them strong, soft, and supple so that inspiration can pass unimpeded down the nerve-muscle-mind channels.
Unimpeded by what? By involuntary contractions of the voluntary muscles, by spasms of will. Our fears, doubts, and rigidities are manifested physiologically, as excessive muscular tension, or what Wilhelm Reich called “body armor.” If I “try” to play, I fail; if I force the play, I crush it; if I race, I trip. Any time I stiffen or brace myself against some error or problem, the very act of bracing would cause the problem to occur.
The only road to strength is vulnerability.
