Yehudi Menuhin: Deeper insights into playing the violin ..

Yehudi Menuhin, painting by Myfanwy Pavelic

Excerpts from Menuhin's memoir Unfinished Journey, to read and reread ..

"The performing violinist continually reviews the hours, days and weeks preceding a performance, charting the many elements that will release his potential ... he knows that when his body is exercised, his blood circulating, his stomach light, his mind clear, the music ringing in his heart, his violin clean and polished, its strings in good order, the bow hair full and evenly spread, then - but only then - he is in command ... But neglect of the least of these elements must gnaw his conscience. 

“So a violinist lives in training. He makes his body his vocation. His stance must be erect yet supple so that, like a graceful reed, he may wave with the breeze and yet remain perfectly aligned from head through spine to feet. He is a living structure stretched between the magnets of sun and earth. Just as only a stretched string can vibrate, so before a violinist's body vibrates he must feel drawn upward, his head delicately poised on the vertebrae, his diaphragm raising him on a cushion of air, while the working parts of his anatomy - shoulders and arms, hands and fingers -float and balance at different levels. Elegant management of the body is among the qualities civilisation denies us, and too often the violin, inviting surrender, only makes rigidity more rigid."

"All influences pointed towards less tension, more effective application of energy, the breaking down of resistance in every joint, the coordination of all motions into one motion; and illustrated the profound truth that strength comes not from strength but from the subtle comprehension of  process, of proportion and balance."

"..what the eye sees - the raised arm - is but the last link in a chain of events originating in the mind. To be conscious of these events as they happen, before they are apparent to the eye, is a lesson in the subtlety I believe to be a cardinal principle of violin playing; but just to awaken oneself to them is enough."

"Not for the violinist the exhibitionist and fiery springing from seat or keyboard of a virtuoso pianist, or the acrobatics of certain conductors. He is part of his violin, his left hand fingering its way, without any margin for error, over the millimetric subdivisions of a space that varies like a slide rule, and his bow never leaving the string but under precise, controlled conditions."

"Perfection cannot be achieved unless its pursuit becomes a way of life. My goal has been so to play the violin that whatever I play is an exercise for whatever I might play. Concentrated observation and practice of minuteness are gradually absorbed; the conscious brain is short-circuited;"

Creation is sacrosanct ...

Sringeri - a snake protects a pregnant frog

Hinduism reveres creation and birth as holiest of holies! The womb or garbha is considered the most sacred place as it houses and nourishes the new life. Where ever new life is ushered, that land is sacred and by that analogy, the entire earth is sacred. The highest duty of man is to protect creation and allow the work of mother nature to flow uninterrupted. 

The legend of Sringeri exemplifies this spirit. Legend has it that when a great sage came to Sringeri, nestled in Sahyadri mountain ranges, he saw an extraordinary sight on the banks of the Tunga river. A cobra with a raised hood was providing shelter to a frog that was about to give birth, providing the mother some shade from the scorching afternoon sun. The sage was struck by this sight where an adverse enemy goes beyond its natural instinct to protect the birth of new life. Here the sage established his first monastery!

The act of procreation is the holy work of nature and not something to be ashamed of. The human body is not considered as vulgar ..instead it is glorified in all its beauty and life giving capability. This spirit is visible in all Hindu temples where sculptures of virile and full-figured humans, pregnant women and all forms of life are equally revered. 

Human Body: Our very first instrument

 "The practice of yoga induces a primary sense of measure and proportion. Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony"  I just put down the book "Unfinished Journey" the memoir of violinist Yehudi Menuhin. His words on the human body drew out some of my own insights.

It was when I started learning Indian classical dance in my late thirties that I became painfully aware of the lack of strength and rhythm in my body. There was lethargy and clumsiness in my body and all its movements. Most of us are born with the gifts of grace, elegance, symmetry and harmony of the body but we lose them over the years by gross disuse. The inactivity built into our over civilized world has become a curse to the human body.

In my slow journey towards reversing the negative impacts of decades of neglect, I have realized that a fine-tuned, lithe and agile body requires physical labor and the discipline for lifelong cultivation. Irrespective of age, we must embrace a discipline like yoga, martial arts or classical dance forms to build and sustain strength and agility in the body way into old age.

"It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” - Socrates

The mind must remain a servant

My aunt recently sunk into depression for a brief period. A few of my friends are also battling mental illnesses.

I think one of the likely causes is that.. while most of us exercise moderation in eating, drinking and other aspects related to our physical bodies, we neglect aspects of  our mind. Moderation in thinking is absolutely essential for a sane mind. Over thinking is a disease on the same level as overeating. The mind or any of the senses running amok spells doom. The intellect must have a tight reign on the mind and the five senses.

Writer David Foster Wallace, who battled depression for decades nails this in his writing ..
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline ...that is real freedom...The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting .. 
“Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master" - Robin Sharma 

Federer: Display of divine intelligence ..

Subtlety, touch and finesse .. 

There are instances in our lives when we are awe struck at seeing a thing of perfect beauty and harmony.... a display of divine intelligence!!. Intelligence that arises from the synergy of mind, body and senses to produce something of exquisite beauty. No one could have come closer to capturing this feeling in words as has David Foster Wallace in his article "Roger Federer as a Religious Experience" for The New York Times. I read this article over and over again! Wallace equates watching Federer's play to a "near-religious" experience. Here are a few snippets from the article for us to savor.

On the human body and kinetic beauty ...
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. .. 
The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal...What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously - its just that these things are much harder to feel and apprecite in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous ephiphanies (I'm so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!" etc), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important - they make up for a lot.

On the beauty and grace of Federer's game ..
A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game....Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.  ... The Swiss has brought to men’s tennis degrees of touch and subtlety unseen since (at least) the days of McEnroe’s prime. 

On Federer's intelligence

..  this intelligence often manifests as angle. Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision,  ... these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere — they’re often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer’s manipulation of opponents’ positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce. 

On Nadal and Federer ..
This Wimbledon final’s got the revenge narrative, the king-versus-regicide dynamic, the stark character contrasts. It’s the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver!!.

On the metaphysical explanation of Federer's dominance
For almost two decades, the party line’s been that certain advances in racket technology, conditioning, and weight training have transformed pro tennis from a game of quickness and finesse into one of athleticism and brute power. How, then, someone of Federer’s consummate finesse has come to dominate the men’s tour is a source of wide and dogmatic confusion. There are three kinds of valid explanation for Federer’s ascendancy. One kind involves mystery and metaphysics and is, I think, closest to the real truth.

The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. And Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. ... 

Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon ..still requires, he looks like what he may well be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light. .. This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss’s will — there’s real metaphysical truth here.  Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won’t experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you.

On practice and kinesthetic sense
Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what’s sometimes called “the kinesthetic sense,” meaning the ability to control the body and its artificial extensions through complex and very quick systems of tasks. English has a whole cloud of terms for various parts of this ability: feel, touch, form, proprioception, coordination, hand-eye coordination, kinesthesia, grace, control, reflexes, and so on. For promising junior players, refining the kinesthetic sense is the main goal of the extreme daily practice regimens we often hear about. The training here is both muscular and neurological. Hitting thousands of strokes, day after day, develops the ability to do by “feel” what cannot be done by regular conscious thought. Repetitive practice like this often looks tedious or even cruel to an outsider, but the outsider can’t feel what’s going on inside the player — tiny adjustments, over and over, and a sense of each change’s effects that gets more and more acute even as it recedes from normal consciousness.

So one type of technical explanation for Federer’s dominion is that he’s just a bit more kinesthetically talented than the other male pros. Only a little bit, since everyone in the Top 100 is himself kinesthetically gifted — but then, tennis is a game of inches.

Kinesthetic virtuoso or no, Roger Federer is now dominating the largest, strongest, fittest, best-trained and coached field of male pros who’ve ever existed, with everyone using a kind of nuclear racket that’s said to have made the finer calibrations of kinesthetic sense irrelevant, like trying to whistle Mozart during a Metallica concert.

What is man without the beast?

After the long, cold, dark and quiet winter months, what a delight it is to hear the first honking of the Canadian geese way up in the sky announcing their arrival.

Newer sounds start to fill the air as the birds come home . The gulls, ravens, starlings and doves follow the geese. Though the weather is still cold, the squealing, cawing sounds warms the heart and awakens in us a wonderful anticipation of spring. We share the land with these birds and beasts. They  reveal to us the ways of nature and its eternal cycles. How desolate our lives would  be without them!

"What is man without the beasts? For if all the beast were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected" - Chief Seattle

Leisure, to stand and stare ..

Today leisure is sadly equated to laziness. We are hell bent on eliminating leisure entirely from our lives and that of our children too. We pack every bit of our time with activities and the lull between activities is filled with anxieties. I came across this beautiful poem on "leisure" by Welsh poet W.H. Davies where he laments the futility of a life without leisure.  The beauty of living is lost when leisure is lost. Let us allow then some leisure in our lives, a daily sabbath of a half hour sans activities or anxieties!

Some time to stand and stare .. 

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad day light,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare. - W.H. Davies