I sing an opera aria, something works much better than it used to. My voice teacher Mark and I are both surprised. He says he remembers how I sounded back in 2010. He looks straight at me to make sure I understand the implications of what he’s about to say, and adds: “You never know how good you’re gonna be.”
I had wanted to take voice lessons for years. In fact, I had gotten the number of my first voice teacher in Paris back in 2002, when she was making us rehearse the Mozart Requiem for Louis-le-Grand’s annual concert — my beloved high school was so full of talented musicians. It took me 8 years to call her. I thought I just didn’t have much of a voice, I was too old, you gotta start early.
Mark is a wonderful teacher. With him, I found a voice I had no idea was there, with more power than I knew I could find. I wonder at the strange bird in me, who was sleeping and seems to rise out of nowhere. I wonder how many more creatures are in there, waiting to be awakened.
One of the luckiest gifts in my life has been to have known the repeated experiences of progress way beyond what I had predicted, all across the board of what I try to do — maths intuition, research, piano, dance, movement, cooking, control of eyebrows to make funny faces (yes, I did practice that), you name it. In another post, I mentioned the poignant experience of having a wall that seemed impossible to scale suddenly crash down. The most salient example of this for me was back in 2001, when I was working towards taking the exam for the Superieur level in piano, the last one at my conservatory, and supposedly the first one towards a professional career.
I had to play three pieces, a prelude and fugue by Shostakovich, Brahms’s first rhapsodie, and a sonata by Prokofiev. Every afternoon, instead of going to school, I was going to the Conservatoire du XIIIe to practice. It wasn’t going very well. The Prokofiev in particular was way harder than what I was capable of playing. A month or so before the exam, there was some kind of dry run in front of the Conservatoire’s director. I did my best. My best wasn’t enough. The director told me that not everyone was meant to continue playing solo piano, that chamber music had given a lot of joy to many. As soon as he was gone, I looked at my beloved teacher M. Exerjean for some kind of hint as to what to make of that discouraging remark. He shook his head with a dismissive frown, telling me not to pay attention to what the director had said and just keep working on the pieces, we’d see where that took us. I kept practicing my 3 to 5 hours every day, and making painfully incremental progress.
On an ordinary Tuesday, as I was playing Brahms slowly, I felt a curious sensation. There was a muscle, towards the back of the armpit, that seemed to light up a little if I played a certain way and let go of all the tension gripping my forearm. And when it did, I had a lot more control over the weight and speed of my hand. It felt like a scintillating connection extending like a wing from my back to the keys. I kept playing the piece slowly, exploring the sensation and playing with it, trying to trace its shape and understand how it worked. Over the next three days, I worked through all three pieces with that new set of wings, slowly, carefully, with intense attention. Then came the time of my weekly lesson.
I didn’t tell my teacher anything, just played with the wings. His eyes had lit up. He asked “did you go see someone? Something is very different.” It had indeed happened in the past that I would go work with another teacher for a bit, with the blessing of my regular teacher, and that had sometimes unlocked new directions. But this time I told him “no… I found some new muscles.” Excitement and hope spread over his face and he told me, “we have two weeks, this can work!”
Indeed, it did. I practiced the new way to burn it into my body. I got slightly sore, at places that were not used to doing anything, but even that was useful, giving me precious instant precise feedback of when I was or wasn’t using a muscle. My daily practice was an elated affair, as I was exploring the new equipment and what it could do, feverishly trying to capture in words the sensations I was experiencing (“for this note, feel it in the middle of the armpit, plus the lateral sides of the back”).
A few days before the exam, I played a dry run in front of the director again. He looked astonished, commented on how the transformation was remarkable. I felt somewhat vindicated, but the emotion crowding out the others was mostly joy — joy at the possibilities. When the day of the exam came, I played well enough to get a Premier Prix (that’s not ranking first, that’s just the name for passing the exam well). The jury told me that even though I had messed up a few passages, “il y a le souffle,” which I don’t know how to translate (“the spirit is there” doesn’t really capture that, there was a gesture of ample breath).
To this day, this remains one of the high points in my life — not the exam; those few seconds on that Tuesday when I discovered I had those sleepy muscles. Often, the event happens imperceptibly, without fanfare, in the focused stillness of deep practice. We spend hours charting a path up the wall that’s currently stopping us, falling down, getting back up again, and then suddenly we notice a fault line, poke it a bit, and the whole wall is gone. Now comes a new phase of giddy exploration, the next wall or plateau not yet in sight.
More importantly, how those weeks unfolded rooted in me a deep trust that working on things works — even when hour after hour seems not to go much of anywhere. I might not know how or when, but if I keep trying and looking for fresh angles, at some point, something is going to work a bit. And then a lot. Or not, and the bit fizzles, but the next one works. Sometimes it can be brute force, more frequently it’s a gentler approach of asking kindly, but often, as an awesome aerials teacher used to say about improving flexibility (I don’t remember her name, but it was in San Francisco). But the trust that it works sees me through the frustrating plateaus. It keeps alive the slow burning flame of not giving up, chip chip chip away, drip drip drip, like water carving a rock. I am forever a worshipper of the art of relentless patience.
I notice it with exercise and fine motor coordination of the larger muscles, too. I try to work on a specific muscle, like currently my lazy iliopsoas. It’s so used to slacking off and letting the quads or abs do the work. I had mostly given up on it, it was just something I was bad at (I’m sure “being bad at using your iliopsoas” is a thing — although it might very well be something else, I find the functioning of the hip endlessly confusing). Indeed, every time I would try those exercises of sitting on the floor with legs extended straight in front of me, in an L shape, and lifting my leg without rounding my lower back, it was hard and crampy and I would get just a measly few centimeters up. Proof that it’s just not my thing! And it was such a negative experience with no visible benefit, why do it often.
But we are living things. We adapt. Our bodies, our brains, everything even the bones — piezoelectricity shapes the bones according to the pressure we subject them to. So when I finally decided to stop accepting defeat before even fighting the battle, the iliopsoas actually started working. I didn’t see anything at first, but after a few months it was unmistakable.
It gets even better: not only will things improve if I keep going through that annoying exercise every day — but the act of doing the annoying exercise gets easier and easier. If I tell myself I need to run to get a stronger heart, and I run, and it feels awful and painful — I face the daunting task of doing that again regularly. But I forget that it will actually get easier every day, so that the hardest session is probably already behind me (unless I get sore enough that the next one is painful). The body adapts, it will grow better fibers here, faster nerves there, increase my oxygen capacity, and next week, that same thing I just committed to doing regularly, will be a lot easier, until I can just breeze through it. Or I can practice at my upper tolerance of hardness, and simply keep moving the goalposts to figure out “how good I can be.”
That brings me back to how I don’t know that. We don’t have today the tools we’ll have tomorrow. So, we’re making predictions based on how the current machine performs; but the machine itself is a beautifully dynamic organism, over multiple scales and timeframes. The nerve pathways will become more efficient, new neuron connections will form, more myeline will coat the nerves, the muscle fibers will bulk up, the connective tissue will become more supple and pliable, and even the bones will adapt their shape.
The flip side of “use it or lose it” goes beyond keeping it, it’s “use it and gain it.” It will become easier. Beyond the exhilarating instant gratification of noticing something new or suddenly understanding something (the aha and eureka moments when something clicks — then again, these mostly happen to the prepared mind and body), from a slightly different focus of consciousness, we will get help from deep changes in the machine, at the nerve, muscle, or some other level, or something going from conscious control to automated, effortless habit. For example, when some goal-directed behavior becomes a habit, activations will be seen more posteriorly in the striatum. The brain is wonderfully adaptive.
When I hear “you can do anything” as encouragement, it doesn’t do anything for me because I don’t buy it. I can’t be the best basketball player in the world with my 5’3, even if I gave it my all. But I don’t know how good I can be. This is the more humble position that resonates the most with my experience, and also gives me the most room for exploration and curiosity. I like the uncertainty, the thrill of discovery! Playing around, finding out, tugging at the limit, seeing if it gives. You never know how good you’re gonna be.
Notes and links:
Mark Oswald, my wonderful voice teacher
Edouard Exerjean, my beloved first piano teacher
“The stress acting on the bone produces the piezoelectric effect. This effect, in turn, attracts bone-building cells (called osteoblasts) because of the formation of electrical dipoles. This subsequently deposits minerals--primarily calcium--on the stressed side of the bone. Hence, the piezoelectric effect increases bone density.”
The brain that changes itself (thanks to Sam Y for introducing me to this book)