Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time

by Natalie Hodges

in the 2014 study, he and his team found that the drug psilocybin caused “a collapse of the normally highly organized activity with the default-mode network (DMN)”—a collapse that, in turn, produced a state of “unconstrained cognition and less ordered (high-entropy) neurodynamics.”

The drug of improvisation, like drugs of altered consciousness, seems to open up associative pathways along which the self is given permission to disintegrate, to give in to the pull of disorder and its accompanying freedoms.

In fact, when seen through another lens, improvisation looks not like order unraveling but order restored, more a path integral than an arrow of time. The irreversibility is there, yes, the singular momentariness; but there’s also the sense that the improviser is creating a form that holds up in time and makes sense in it, with a beginning and an end that lead, and then lead back to, each other.

And yet in life there is, from time to time, a sense of looping back, for all of us; the sense that time itself may not be as linear, entropic, random as it seems.

Time renders most individual moments meaningless, or at least less important than they originally seemed, but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux; we are always making it up and then revising as we go along, ordering and reordering our understanding of the past in real time.

In the study of Montero’s brain, the researchers noted that, though the flow states brought on by deactivation of the DMN generally represent a momentary suspension of ego, “artists like GM also call on their emotions and personal identity when performing”—even if these emotions are not “the primary subject of conscious thought.”

To create is indeed to remember; to remember is to involve oneself in a universe of feeling, to fold time in on itself until it can contain itself no longer. That first suddenness, and the ensuing flow; river of fire, mouth of ecstasy, the singular moment of fission and rapture.

[A]rt, like life, is inclined to mitigate,to loosen, to modify, even to break strictsymmetry. But seldom is asymmetrymerely the absence of symmetry. Even inasymmetric designs one feels symmetry asthe norm from which one deviates under theinfluence of forces of non-formal character. —Hermann Weyl, Symmetry

The daughter of a close family friend, a Korean girl my mother’s age, had started violin when she was two and eventually went on to study at Juilliard; she was playing the Mozart concertos when my mother was just learning “Hot Cross Buns.”

This, then, is the immigrant credo: to be able to give your children what you did not have yourself.

Regimented daily practice—consisting of scales and arpeggios, études, new pieces, and “review” pieces, always in that order—

She had her own metaphors and images for the music, too: the snowstorm section, the ascending line like the flight of birds, the section like a prayer.

I say all this now because, in that early unself-conscious beginning, I loved music because music was how I perceived the world, in a synesthetic collision of one sense with another, one love with another. And at the center of that world was Mom.

She gives, I take: that has always been the imbalanced equation of our relationship, its asymmetry and equilibrium.

I would wake her up under the guise of needing her help because I felt too guilty to say what I really meant: that I hated being alone in the dark, that I needed her to be adrift with me.

I wanted to show her how hard I was working and that I didn’t take my lessons for granted, and, more than anything, to validate her sacrifice, feeling beholden even though I knew she had never asked that repayment of me.

As I get older, it seems to me that trying to learn how to love somebody the right way—to give enough of yourself, but never too much—is to discover the frightening asymmetry at the heart of love.

There is a Korean phrase, “yeolsimhi il hagehsseumnidah,” that is proclaimed with a deep and earnest bow whenever one undertakes something new: “I will work hard; I will do my best.”

Is there something to be said for letting kids quit, fail, and find their way on their own? Surely. Yet what these criticisms miss, for me, is the way that Chua’s methods, codified as they are into the American stereotype of the relentlessly task-mastering Asian mother, are both germane to the immigrant experience and revealing of its burden.

Fail to make the most of your opportunity, and all your family’s sacrifice was for naught; bang your head against the wall and seize that chance with all your strength, and even though you’ll add your own nameless face to the swelling flesh of the stereotype you’ll at least have found some way to survive, if never to belong.

What happens, then, when the desire to assimilate runs up against the desire to assert an individual voice?

I know now, as I write this, that it’s going to sound as though my mother saw in me the resurrection of her dead dream, the vehicle by which I would fulfill a broken promise of a life in music. But that’s not it, that cannot be it, because hers was never a desperate devotion, nor a self-serving, self-seeking one.

The illness he accused her of, in his words, was “being a perfectionist mother.” He had always hated our involvement in music in particular; he thought it smacked of “middle-class” immigrant striving.

The performance of identity, especially that of a “model minority,” rarely, if ever, lends itself to notions of equality: In trying to play the part society has prescribed for you, you are inherently left at the mercy of the people who are watching, auditioning you for their way of life, evaluating whether or not you belong.

Every personal identity is an entity in flux, a constant negotiation of the multitude of more specific identities that it comprises and their myriad proportions to one another. Wife and mother, parent and child, Korean and American: Each of us has the capacity to become a slightly different person, depending on where we are and whom we are with, in any given moment of interaction.

I think, my mother feared the time translation of her experience as an immigrant onto the lifetimes of her children: the possibility that we would have to endure the same uncertainty and degradation that she did, that her history would repeat itself. She wanted to break that symmetry at all costs.

What she didn’t mention—yet implicit in her metaphor—is the fact that the rocket boosters, having given the last full measure of devotion at the upper limits of the atmosphere, must reverse their course and fall, spent, back to Earth.

Somehow, I can already feel that perhaps, for the first time, all my work and effort might not be enough.

Even though he died when I was so young, it felt like we spent a lifetime together.

Our selves are equal parts our fate and our choice—but who can say what is one and not the other?

She never could have been a Tiger Mother, not really, because all the rest of us had to do to make her happy was just wake up in the morning.

Now, Uhmma, your memory is mine. Sometimes it felt, and feels still, that there is no separation between us—we think of the same word at the same time and our instincts are uncannily in sync.

I feel it most acutely, now, remembering those moments of closeness that somehow laid bare the caverns of time and experience and sorrow between us: the shadow of that near symmetry between past and future, you and I; the sense that we are somehow in sync yet perpetually out of phase in time.

Implicit in time’s asymmetry, then, is the notion of becoming. The universe unspools itself toward a state of higher entropy; its edges fray, its dust is swept into corners, and this process of degradation and erosion is what separates the future from the past.

When we seek to become something or someone else, to change our lives and leave the past behind, we necessarily abandon ourselves to entropy: We scatter old pieces of ourselves, willfully smudge our edges and make a mess of things, strive to break free of old symmetries that we feel can no longer contain us.

You make those first daring marks on the blank sheet with shaky-fingered excitement—they seem at once a profanation and a solemn, sacred commencement. Later, you will read it again and tingle with modest embarrassment and shy pride, because it is a good poem.

She will feel a selfish sadness that there is a part of you unknown to her and to which she is unknown, but it is because she loves you. She knows you haven’t been able to write for a long time. There’s always other, more immediate, more self-erasing work to be done.

Developed by pedagogue Shinichi Suzuki in the middle of the twentieth century, the Suzuki Method is an international curriculum of instrument playing that applies “the basic principles of language acquisition to the learning of music,” and which is based on the belief that, with the “loving encouragement” of a parent, “every child can learn” to play an instrument.

It’s been four months since I’ve touched my violin, after almost two decades of daily, hours-long practice, and I am afraid to begin again, afraid of the sounds I might make, of what ugliness may come crawling out if I crack open that long a silence.

It hardly seems fair, but eighteen years of cultivated technique can deteriorate, if not entirely, then alarmingly fast, along with your hand strength; your fingers aren’t as nimble or strong when you first return to playing, the way you can lose in a matter of weeks the muscle it took months to build up in the gym.

The Chaconne is the fifth and final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, which itself is the second in his cycle of six sonatas and partitas for solo violin.

Bach worked as a church organist and composer for most of his life, so much of what he produced was religious music written for church services. At one point in his career, he was writing a new cantata every week. But he also composed secular music, often as a study in how to master a particular instrument.

As a musical form, a chaconne is simultaneously a dance in three-beat time and a series of continuous variations on a single harmonic theme, usually the same bass line repeated over and over again, which dictates the pattern of chords that anchor the variations to one another.

There are other chaconnes by other composers—as a form it was especially popular during the Baroque period—but Bach’s is the most monumental and enduring.

Within the Chaconne, a universe of feeling is bounded in a nutshell: many voices conflated into one, a lifetime of “deepest thoughts and powerful feelings” condensed into fifteen fleeting yet interminable minutes. I know of no piece more beautiful or more full of suffering.

“You shouldn’t be playing the Chaconne,” he said, “it’s too hard for you.” I must have looked crestfallen, because then he added, more gently, “Look, you can always come back to it. It’s one of those pieces that’ll be with you your whole life.”

All the practicing—the mind-numbing repetitions, the bloody fingernails, the brutally late nights—was either a way of convincing myself it would all be worth it or punishing myself for the fact that it wouldn’t, I’m not sure which.

But I can’t bring myself to draw the bow. It’s like when you want to tell someone how you feel but don’t quite have the words, and you swallow into silence because you are afraid of what you might say, of how you might dismay and astonish yourself.

The way God is glorified through prayer—not by words of worship only, but by the very act of kneeling before Him—that’s how Bach wrote. He removed his ego from his music so that he might make of that music a worthy offering. This deep humility pervades even his secular compositions.

There is nothing to cover it, nowhere to hide, nothing to mitigate its ecstasy or its suffering: de profundis clamavi ad te Domine, out of the depths I cry unto you, O Lord. Bach strips away the ego of both composer and performer, with all its defenses and desires, in order to lay bare pure feeling: a sin confessed after a long silence, a head bowed in prayer.