Another quote from Paul Perry's weblog rings true with me this evening:
Klossowski proposes a complementary principle: he suggests that every intention is an external event, a modification of my being, and hence a sort of demonic possession. Each thought or desire is an alteration of my previous state; it is an intrusion of the outside, a whispering in my ear, a breath that I inhale and exhale, an alien spirit prompting me from offstage or insinuating itself within me.I get a very practical sense of the "intrusion" part of this as I practice the piano. I'm nearly through Bartok's Mikrokosmos Book 1 after years of intermittent short spans of practice. After I've worked several days on a piece, long enough for me to know it fairly well, the main struggle is sometimes simply to keep a singular focus on it long enough to get through it. It seems like a simple enough task, but I realize how insistently other thoughts intrude. It's observing this process that interests me, almost more than the overt task of learning to play more complex things.
Bartok's clear goal in the progression of pieces in Mikrokosmos (at least in Book 1) is to teach independent working of the hands. He must also have wanted to teach attention, because he's a devious genius at never letting you relax it -- a pattern never repeats long enough to be played in a mechanical way, and something new is introduced in every piece. You can almost sense him chuckling a bit as he develops them. You can also sense your attention ever so slowly being split in two as the two hands' parts vary progressively more through the book. I'd love to get to the point where I also have a third attention that can listen to the the two parts as my hands play them. Taking this further, it's astounding to think of Bach spontaneously inventing and playing multi-part fugues.
So, what's demanded by this separation of attentions is a sort of overarching unity of attention, keeping out the stray noise. It seems to be a good goal to develop this.
June 29, 2002 01:06 AM