Mark Tanner - Mindfulness in Music: Notes on Finding Life’s Rhythm

The essence of meditation is beautifully simple, yet Buddhists, who practise it for a lifetime, may still sense the possibility of a deeper, even more profound serenity. Similarly, a musicians longer-term pursuit of perfection will almost invariably be driven by a desire to achieve something immediate and personal.

I N THE BROADEST SENSE , exercising mindfulness in music is about being open, embracing and receptive to sound. Beyond this loose starting point, mindfulness splinters off into different directions according to our specific orientation. Being mindful as a performing musician, for example, means tapping into that most elusive of flow states, whereby ones musical expression is able to radiate outwards in a vivid, continuous stream. This requires the performer to be so at ease with the environment, and so focused on the musical experience itself, that nothing else perhaps especially matters of execution (let alone the audience) actually matters.

For the practising musician, who may have little or no aspiration ever to perform in public, but who prefers instead to derive pleasure from the act of playing or singing, mindfulness is about locking on to each valuable passing moment. This brings about more rewarding, satisfying playing and learning, and at the same time holds back the incapacitating habits of over-thinking, over-practising and over-reaching. The act of doing should matter more to us than what we might eventually accomplish; when this is not the case, I cant help wondering if we are simply missing the point.

For the keen listener, mindfulness is primarily a matter of feeling free of distraction, so that one becomes entirely swept up by the music or the dramatic sound of a storm thrusting its way through a valley, for example and hence able to gain maximum pleasure from so doing. Equally, there will be times when it becomes important to play a more active role in the musical experience, not just sit back and allow the music to do all the work.

But irrespective of our orientation which may well change over time we will need to drill downwards into the nature of sound itself, not just our receptiveness to it, and perhaps also to contemplate afresh our own capacity for creativity.