Why is it difficult to be spontaneous and self-expressive as a musician? It should be easy: it is a simple act of letting go, tuning into yourself and feeling whatever is there: dark passions, love, vulnerability, powerful, deep consciousness that expresses an infinite variety of feelings about what it means to be alive… Music comes from intelligence that does not calculate or measure but rather flows, simmers, swells, smoulders and bubbles inside us in a place beyond thought. Musical truth is almost self-indulgence, letting the body and soul guide expression without censorship, without any self-conscious checking of its validity. It is to return to the mind of a child, before knowledge, belief, mimicry and the relentless desire for an impressive performance eclipsed pure expression of feeling. It is a kind of innocence – an honesty so personal that it is pure self, alone, unity with everything, without reference. It is unbridled joy and pathos – the exhilaration of being.

Unconscious fear triggers ego control

And this, of course, is exactly why it is so difficult. All this joy and pathos is terrifying to the reasonable, civilised ego that seeks comfort, satisfaction and approval. The unmanaged, primal motivation of fluent music-making triggers shame and horror within the ego mind. So to mask this fear and shame, the head gets to work, taking over the show. The ego mind generates a myriad thoughts, techniques, comparisons and aspirations to take the music out of us – out of our body and soul – and put it somewhere safe: on a pedestal, in the iconic face of a star performer, in a textbook, in the familiar strains of a hit song, in the rarefied glass case of a concert hall, or wrapped up in cellophane hidden inside a glossy commodity, branded and packaged as cool or clever. It places music anywhere but deep inside us. But the craving for its magic never subsides and we grope for it, believing it to be always out of reach, feeling inadequate, playing by numbers, attempting lame karaoke, learning theories and techniques to execute musical code, going through the motions, trying to create the best facsimile of music that we can. And the sounds we make are not real music… Music which does not originate in the body and soul is neither original nor musical. Real music is undeniable, raw, part of nature’s rise and fall, shimmering, unfolding like waves or galaxies in constant, magnificent creation.

The courage to feel

It takes enormous courage to acknowledge and reveal our inner musician consciously, to defy the ego’s dishonest claim to musical intelligence and surrender to such an animal force – a creative urge as mysterious as nature itself. The judging, comparing, controlling mind will always try to deny the existence of such deep forces of creativity and intelligence. It will fearfully hold onto the belief that anything that cannot be described in words or numbers – anything that cannot be evaluated or controlled – is simply not real. But the unfolding meanings of rhythmic and tonal syntax do indeed describe what this profound consciousness perceives, it relates these extraordinary feelings that are beyond the scope of words. When we make music fluently, it comes from and expresses intelligence that words can never contain. And so these words that I write are too mere stumblings in the dark, a futile attempt to clarify infinity, scratching the surface of a thing that has unfathomable depth.

Focus and let go

Only when we master and focus our mind, hold it still and quiet enough for the fear to subside, do we find the courage to truly let go and make music with complete abandon. We can then jump into the abyss, we can achieve escape velocity and fly. We feel fully, the lights come on and this inner world is described by our spontaneous outpouring of music in breathtaking, vivid detail. And the paradox is that singing or playing music then becomes as simple as breathing, pure childsplay, free-flowing, effortless and natural.

As a fluent musician, to learn to play fast notes on the piano, you first need mental dexterity and then you need to be able to let go and play with physical and rhythmic freedom. It is the passive, muscle-memory approach that becomes obsessed with the physical difficulty of fast playing. In reality, strong fingers are a bit of a myth: once you can find and maintain the right mental focus whilst letting go and playing with genuine freedom, fast notes are easy to play.

It can feel quite strange for students of fluent musicianship to be forced to think of nothing but a simple model of how music works: I won’t allow students’ focus to drift towards anything other than intending musical shapes made from rhythm cells and tonal blocks plugged into the rhythmic matrix and keyboard map. At the slightest sign of critical thinking, ruminating or analysing, I pounce! Success is completely dependent on finding a single-minded moment-by-moment focus on the model and I realise that this approach can seem dogmatic. I make jokes about wanting blind obedience and PlayPianoFluently being a cult and when these jokes don’t raise a laugh, it’s a little unnerving for me…

PlayPianoFluently is not a cult!

So it’s very tricky for me as a teacher. Any cognitive distractions away from the model as you play are just that… distractions! So I have no choice but to coach people to stop thinking, to simply focus on the components of a basic model unfolding in real time! I have to test their learning as if they were five years old and five-year-olds would find it no more difficult than adults with all their sophisticated reasoning skills. It requires less deep investigation or nuanced understanding and more simple memorising. And it seems to go against the established current mores of education, mores that make a virtue of students thinking for themselves and finding their own path to understanding, mores which are good and right, I’d say, in most learning contexts. But as playing the keys fluently is a skill to be practised, rather than a path of intellectual discovery, the mind needs only to be focused and still. I would be lying if I didn’t teach it in this way.

Really I’m the very opposite of a dogmatist as a piano teacher. I do encourage students to explore, creatively, passionately and self-indulgently, just not cognitively. I want them to do it on the level of pure feeling rather than thinking, discover themselves more with the intelligence of the body and soul than the head. I want them to surrender and rebel against their fearful inner critic; to express themselves playfully, generating drama, poetry, unfolding story, nuance, tension and resolution.

Be self-indulgent, free and rebellious

How a fluent musician explores the way musical shapes unfold in the rhythmic matrix to create the amazing landscape of musical meaning is completely and utterly up to them as an individual. A teacher should dictate nothing. But the part of the brain that explores, experiences and generates this musical landscape feels less like the mind and more like the body and soul. It’s a visceral, sensual, emotional and ultimately very personal journey of discovery. The cognitive mind needs to be quiet, calm and clearly focused for this freedom to occur.

Most of the time in our busy civilised lives, we are consumed by constant mental striving: an endless cognitive chatter, measuring, checking, judging,  evaluating and arguing about what and who is right and this keeps the body-and-soul part of our wisdom under wraps. Music is a rebellion against this current default way of relating to each other and the world. There are not very many activities that unlock our inner selves in this very free, unfettered way, where critical evaluation becomes redundant – certain sports might come close, especially extreme ones like surfing, martial arts and of course fluent performing arts like dancing and music-making. Making music is one of those rare activities that can totally free the genie and grant us our deepest wish to experience life directly and uncensored.

In the throes of  unfolding musical expression, the mind must be humble and quiet – obedient even – whilst the body and soul become active and take over. However, the mind has a very important job to do in keeping a constant focus: it must stay awake and alert in order to choose or “tag” shapes made from rhythm cells and tonal blocks plugged into the matrix and the keyboard map. Of course, it must do that actively and this is a mental skill which requires practice. It must do this well… only nothing else!