Thoughts After A Movement Lesson

I take weekly movement lessons with Adarian Barr. Today I learned about ipsilateral movement patterns, e.g., how the same side limbs work together by bending or straightening at the same time.

(Here’s where we worked on my playing. I’d forgotten to turn on original sound on zoom so you can’t hear most of my playing, but how my body was playing and moving much more smoothly at the end of the clip compared to the beginning should be clear as day.)

He explained to me how walking is actually ipsilateral even though it looks contralateral (and commonly thought as being contralateral). That it is only due to the longer duration of the arm swing (than leg movement) that the ipsilateral movement looks contralateral. I won’t take the time to go into the details that he went into to help me understand and experience this concept, but it was a mind-blowing ah-ha moment when I did. I love (and trust) when I’m enlightened to what something really IS-the first principle of all first principles. (I still leave room for alternate explanations. But the what it IS needs to make sense, otherwise, there’s no point in listening to any further conjectures when the foundational belief is faulty. But I always leave room for the possibility that there might be other ways to interpret what anything IS.)

When the understanding of movement is that thorough, you can apply it to anything that requires movement. Adarian then coached me as I played the violin (not being a musician himself!), finding the relationship between a bent knee and a bent arm, flexed wrists and flexed ankles, moving fingers and moving toes. I’m no longer surprised by getting dramatic improvement from things he teaches me. But what was particularly striking about today’s lesson was this: I had been trying to get to the bottom of the movement relationship between the many fulcrums of the body for playing-where the instrument comes into contact with the neck, the L thumb, the L foot, the L shoulder blade, and how all of those are local axis points but also creating a big global leverage system where everything between them needs to rotate (like a towel) in concert with one another. It’s complex, and I’ve been stuck on zooming in on the most obvious problematic spots-my mid-section. I’ve often talked about my “twisties”, where my ligaments are twisted in the wrong ways, inhibiting the most simple movements. And here’s the amazing thing about today: Adarian never asked me to think about the problematic areas, but all of a sudden I was able to sense my mid-section in ways I’d never felt before as I was paying attention to rotate my toes/fingers as he instructed. It made me able to move things that I could not previously, and also helped me discern how they were twisted and gave me ideas as to how to correct. In other words, he helped me find solutions to problems while doing something seemingly completely unrelated. And I know that this deepening of my self-knowledge about my body will open up a whole new avenue for myself to further improve.

A few months ago, I went to a concert given by a violinist without a right hand. He used a specially-designed prosthetic to help him hold the bow. It’s impressive what he could do with his physical limitations, and he’s an expressive musician, too. But I could not help but notice that his mechanics in playing was very much about compensating for what he lacked (no right hand and a shortened right arm), forcing rotations his physicality did not allow, which in turn limited his execution and expression. He’s had an impressive list of teachers. These violinists who taught him, while being great players, probably only instructed him from the point of view of their relative whole to his relative lack. And that central facet was apparent to me watching him play. Realistically, I feel he’ll always be limited without a hand and fingers, but I feel he’s far from playing at his best. (I showed Adarian a video of his. First thing he pointed out was that the shape of his prosthetic was not facilitating how the arm needs to rotate with the bow. The most simple thing-he showed me how if it’s simply angled differently it would have made a world of difference for him.) Imagine if this violinist were to be able to get help where he could learn through the lens of what the movement IS, rather than filtered through other bodies of entirely different structure. When anything is truly understood as what it really is at its most fundamental core, you can operate from the kernel of truth without the distortion of subjectivity. (Again, and again, first principles.)

But that got me thinking about playing in general, missing limbs or not. Traditional pedagogy is filled with concepts that try to compensate for supposed weaknesses. Strengthening the pinky, developing a “strong” bow arm (always implying weakness). While there’s an isolated element of truth in these descriptions, trying to look for solutions within said descriptions is, to say the least, short-sighted, if even accurate at all. Learning from a place of lack is essentially not being able to see what you have. And this is not some positive-thinking BS (in case I haven’t said enough-I positively hate that stuff), but simply that if you can’t truly see the objective truth of what you have, or don’t have, it’d quite simply be impossible to form a complete picture of your situation for a fair assessment. To go even a level deeper, conventional views often approach common playing movement as something one has to stretch or strengthen or muscle their way into, lacking the true knowledge of how the body and natural movement work. Yes, training is required, but it looks drastically different from “I need to strengthen muscle X as X is seemingly the only moving part.” (I stress “seemingly”.)

Many traditional concepts instruct one to move in ways that are not even correct for the violin-they move on the wrong planes and at the wrong angles. Many don’t factor in the diagonal/oblique directions that playing requires, and how certain movements are impossible to execute based on the actual shape of our joints. (Simplest examples: the idea of elbow height solely dictating string crossing, and often vibrato exercises that train one to move in ways that do not even correspond with the direction of how the finger vibrates.) I often tell my students to imagine building a robot or model from the ground up to move in ways that playing requires. How would you do that? What would the model look like? But of course we could never build as intricate a model as the human body-which is why we can do things that robots can’t, and why we can’t say in order to do this, just move that. There are too many joints working together in infinite possibilities to do what we do. That’s also why we need to make logical sense of our physiology while understanding that we can’t be limited by this 1+1=2 kind of thinking. And that is also my point about my lesson today. Adarian’s formula defies 1+1=2 and yet it makes perfect sense. It is quite simply, logical. (This is probably what I aim for in life in perhaps too many ways: that 1+1=🤯🥳, or at the very least, 2.1. It’s how I see musical partnerships, music-making, human connections, learning, any act of performance, teaching. 1+1=1.5 is obviously problematic, but 1+1=2 is not just underwhelming, but worse, more often than not incorrect, due to its lack of vision and narrowness. Having even just the extra 0.1, no matter how ordinary a moment, makes something worthwhile. Admittedly, life can sometimes be on the disappointing side with these expectations… And maybe also why I’d not passed math since the age of 14!)

In music in particular, sometimes what’s missing is outside of the movement and the mechanics, but lies in the understanding of the music itself, its gestures and momentum. The what it is. And how that fits logically with the movement and execution itself. To me, that’s the entirety of technique, the integration of the mechanics with the musicianship. But that’s another topic for another post. 

On the opposite spectrum of being traditional, sometimes people place importance on trying to be different, on being able to think out of the box. But I don’t think being different is something to strive for. The way Adarian sees past the way timing masks a movement’s true nature makes his conclusion seem different and contrarian. But that doesn’t come from him trying to be different. It comes from his ability to see things for what they are. While the extent of his acuity is not a gift bestowed to many - everybody can learn, and should strive to, see things for what they are. I believe that’s the only way to achieve any kind of original thinking, true understanding, intelligence, and creativity - to see things as what they are. (To be different for its own sake only distorts). I find that many of the traditional learning mindsets (in any field) not only do not place any importance on this, they sometimes entirely ignore it (the medical field, for example, is egregiously guilty of that, which in the business of saving lives… I wish someone would address that). To truly understand what something is sounds simple, but anything simple is not easy to come to. But once you get to that kernel, truly the possibilities are limitless and beyond anything you can remotely imagine.