Unreasonable effectiveness of high-level metaphors in music education
A friend of mine, a theoretical physicist turned contemporary dancer, once told me about the distinct instruction styles of two dance teachers she was studying with at the time. One of them would describe precisely which muscle groups one needs to activate to achieve a particular posture or motion, and would generally heavily rely on the knowledge of human anatomy and mechanics of movement. The other instructor would tell her students to imagine themselves as a certain creature or object or else orient themselves toward an image beyond themselves and let their bodies figure out how to enact the requisite movement.
These two instruction styles, taken together, are a powerful combo, as being trained in both allows one to benefit from two essential levels of learning, mechanistic and metaphorical. Especially the ability to switch between the two, as needed, is a superpower.
I find that in music, too, one can alternate between the mechanistic and the metaphorical. Mechanistic approach is needed when close attention must be paid to something that’s not working: developing finger flexibility, muscle memory, general body awareness when playing an instrument. But it doesn’t cease to amaze me how metaphors allow you to almost instantaneously make qualitative leaps that would've taken much longer to achieve via incremental practice based on mechanistic instruction. It seems that in the context of learning, once the basics are in place, high-level abstractions and nudges can be more effective than close supervision and micromanagement.
Perhaps music, like dance, especially lends itself to a metaphorical interpretation because, as Jeremy Denk put it in his autobiography Every Good Boy Does Fine, “Melody draws endless metaphorical connections between motion and emotion.” (though melody is of course but one aspect of music but this equally applies to rhythm and harmony and texture).
I still remember how my first piano teacher told me that Brahms must be played “with meat”. That makes perfect sense, at least for his Rhapsodies, if not late piano works — those require a much more delicate approach. It would take much longer to explain this in a mechanistic way — but the “meat” captures an essence that can then be translated into the finger pressure patterns and eventually the target sound. This involves multiple levels of translation, from semantic to acoustic, by way of neural firing pattern and muscle contraction pattern reconfigurations, happening below the consciousness level.
What is surprising to me is how early on it is possible to let high-level metaphors guide you in your learning. I started learning cello about two and a half years ago, and there was a true breakthrough moment for me pretty early on when my teacher told me that bow strokes are like breathing, with upbow as inhalation and downbow as exhalation. This image immediately made it much easier for me to draw the bow in a way that resulted in a fuller and freer sound. From a verbal meaning, my body reconfigured itself in such a way as to emulate breathing with the bow, without much conscious input on my part.
There are countless useful metaphors that can unlock latent performing abilities or show you how to reorient yourself and perceive music anew. And then there are Metaphors. Jeremy Denk relates a story of his performance of Schumann’s Symphonic Études in a class of Leon Fleisher — “a deity of the piano if there ever was one”:
I don’t remember what Fleisher said first, but it was clear that he wasn’t impressed, and maybe even not that interested. He invoked the word “cosmos,” while he looked up at the ceiling, and he had a fantastic metaphor for one variation: “Imagine the gods, bowling with the planets.” He played these gods with his viable hand: scurrying notes, swinging majestically into new harmonies and beats. This was incredible playing, I could sense in one part of my mind, while the other was in shock.
Imagine playing like you imagined the gods, bowling with the planets.
