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

by Natalie Hodges

It was as though the atoms knew before they passed through the slits that, an instant later, they were going to be recorded. In the words of one of the study’s authors: “A future event”—the act of recording their observations—“causes the [atom] to decide its past.”

I couldn’t get back into the time of the music because I was just thinking about how everyone was thinking about me: how badly I had messed up, how awkward and sorry they felt.

Knowing what’s to come—and, more importantly, feeling secure in that knowledge—allows you to let go and focus intensely on communicating, on keeping the piece’s time and yet making its expression feel spontaneous. But when all you can fixate on is your weird psychotic certainty that you’re going to mess up, no matter how well you’ve prepared—that obliterates your sense of being in time. That dread weighs everything else down, so all the parts that might have redeemed the mess-up are wasted. When I am nervous, it feels like a five-pound weight has been added to my bow; my left hand seizes up and grips the neck of the violin in a kind of chokehold. Every moment feels burdened. And no wonder—I can’t focus on making a moment of the music when I am panicking that two bars on I am going to have a memory slip, or that my fingers will tangle up in the development section’s fast passages. Nothing flows, yet somehow the phrases pass me by; I can’t make them lead and lean into one another the way I’ve practiced at home; I can’t rob the time or give it back. I play the music in tempo but cannot feel it in time.

The thought I’ve never been able to get past, the thought that trips me up every time, is: Just because you did this before doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it now, in front of all of them.

This in itself constitutes a paradox: If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing—on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it—except chance? In other words, how can the spontaneous be anything but random; how can music made in a jolt of instinct, on a bolt out of the now, be endowed with a form that makes sense in time, as though it had been written and rewritten and practiced and memorized beforehand? And how, in making that first, most instinctive, most desperate decision, do we choose—if it really can be called “choosing,” if we really choose at all?

That idea of an instantaneous, prescient memory—of remembering the future, as it were—has a strange, surprising corollary in the natural world, in the universe’s order of things. It’s called the path integral, and it occurs in the realm of quantum mechanics: the sphere of the uncertain and statistical, with its tensions and overlappings between the finite and infinite, form and void. Defined by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman during the 1940s, the path integral calculates the probability that a given particle, occupying one position at a particular time, will end up at another position at a later time. The question seems simple enough, but it is complicated by the fact that quantum particles act as waves, and so their position, and the paths they take between positions, can only be described in terms of probability and not of fixity.

“So it was almost as though music was a language that didn’t require a second language to describe it,” McElroy said. “It just was.”

In retrospect, focusing our lives so singularly on classical music was indeed the most stereotypically Asian thing we could have done, we were picture-perfect in that way: four hapa children trailed by our Korean mother to orchestra concerts and rehearsals, each of us with a black instrument case strapped to his or her back. And yet, except during those occasional moments of insinuation or insult, the music itself never felt racialized.*

Yet, according to a 2016 diversity report conducted by the League of American Orchestras, only about 9 percent of professional orchestral musicians identify as Asian or Pacific Islander. Indeed, the predominating group in classical music remains Caucasian, and the scholar Mari Yoshihara, in her 2007 book Musicians from a Different Shore, is quick to note the implications of that asymmetry between image and reality—that “[s]uch an exaggerated perception of Asian dominance in classical music suggests that Asian musicians are racially marked.” “Because classical music is associated with Western high culture and because the performance of classical music requires many years of disciplined training,” she writes, “Asians’ success in this field is often thought to exemplify their assimilation into Euro-american culture,” their incorporation into a “model minority: those who rise in the existing social structure through hard work and attain success in Western culture without posing a direct challenge to the economic and political status quo.”

Equality describes an external relationship between separate entities: between Asians and Caucasians, husbands and wives, parents and their children. In my mother’s experience of assimilation, at least, there was never any point in discussing equality in relation to white people. It was more about scraping by, striking an impossible balance between making sure you didn’t stand out enough to get picked on and doing well enough that you weren’t automatically passed over, cast aside.

The fact that the children of so many Asian immigrants play classical music at a disproportionately high level—that they excel in a genre at the dusty peak of Western high art, one in which contemporary American culture is increasingly less interested—has made it an “Asian thing,” an Asian stereotype, a manifestation of that stubborn will to work that marks a certain kind of perceived inferiority. 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.

But what it’s hard to appreciate until you’ve arrived in your new country, until it’s too late, is that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work or how successful you become, it doesn’t really change how others see you—because the harder you try to transform yourself in order to fit in, the more you reveal yourself to be the outsider you always were. The very process of changing yourself, then, becomes an act of self-preservation: You’re just trying to prove that you belong, to make yourself acceptable to your new country so that you can survive inside of it.

And yet perhaps this is the fundamental difference between first- and second-generation immigrants, between sacrificial parent and prodigal child, the difference I am both afraid of and am somehow seeking. Our broken symmetry is that I, always, will feel as if I have the choice to walk away.)

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.

He signed all of his religious compositions, approximately a thousand of them, “SDG”: Soli Deo gloria, “to God alone the glory.” 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.

Stages implies a progress through time, gives the illusion of linearity—but this is not my experience of grief. Even when I listen all the way through to the end of the Chaconne, I don’t have any sense of having worked through the grief it makes me feel. The sadness is still there, as raw as it ever was. What I do have, or have had in that moment, is a complete experience (perhaps even embrace) of the feeling in all its myriad forms, its painful variations. I have let myself feel; I have let myself remember.

Of course the dancers don’t dance at a distance, and the jury is still out on whether entanglement can be extrapolated from the quantum physical to the human and biological, but you can’t escape the feeling that there must exist some kind of instantaneous, unconscious connection between improvising partners. Entanglement theory holds that before the particles are polarized, whether they will take on a vertical or horizontal polarization is equally probable. In other words, until the moment that one of them passes through the filters, the entangled pair’s polarization is simultaneously vertical and horizontal, the way Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive until you open the box. The instant one of them passes through the filter, its polarization changes; and the other changes with it, as though it always knew in which direction its partner was destined to vibrate.

To improvise with other people, then, is to share that ecstasy with them. The togetherness enabled by Lenson’s “ESP” derives from a shared sense of time, yet one that is far from mechanical; indeed, you are so deeply in sync that you can be completely unmechanical and still stay together.

In order to write credibly, I had to dig into the physics metaphors and biological responses that connect musical temporality to something larger and more fundamental about the human experience. Time, or at least our perception of its passage, is too complicated a subject to examine from either a humanistic or a scientific angle alone. Each needs the other, points inevitably toward the other.

The singularity itself is so small that the effects of quantum mechanics become impossible to ignore, pointing toward some inevitable, undiscovered connection between the gravity that produced it and the quantum theory that helps govern it. And so somehow our intuition remains that there must be something more, something higher, out there for us to discover; we are left still with our human longing to arrive at the oneness of space, time, and experience across the universe.

And yet I tell myself, too, that part of the marvel of living must surely be in our struggle to understand our lives both as we narrate them through memory and as they really are; and that in doing so we might perhaps get closer to knowing the beginning and the end of time.