Ear, Mind, Body | Part 1

Ears, Mind, Body, Part 1 with Paul Katz Most of us when we're sitting at the instrument, we're saying, "How am I ever gonna remember bowings, and fingerings, and tempos, and phrasings, and vibrato, and shifting, and string crossings, and it goes on and on and on forever. A lot of this is auto response, and the way it's governed, is by your ears which can hear all of these things simultaneously. And when you're in this reactive state to what you hear, the ears hear it, the hands, the heart, the mind react. Like there's so much shifting in this passage that it's just impossible to have your mind be able to think about each one. The hands are trained to work in a certain way, and they do it without the mind. With something like the Bach--like the Prelude of the 6th Suite where there's so many shifts, there's so many little things, you can't think about them all. And so I think that's a big--remember when I said I hated Bach cause I sucked at it cause I was so out of tune? >>Right. I think that's mostly what it is because you can't really think in some ways. The list of what we have to keep track of as performing musicians it's a myriad--it's endless--it's infinite. So the way we do that is with our ears. Our ears are trained to ask our hands for certain things, and our ears and our heart, and our sense of the instrument-- those things are different from conscious thought. Conscious thought trains them in the practice room, but in the end, we will feel better on stage with less conscious thought. Then I think the aim is to let the ears take over--to let the heart take over-- to be in the moment--that's the ideal, right? So if we can train all of this stuff, >> Get it out of the way. >> and get it out of the way. But we'll never get it out of the way if we don't take care of it at some point. That's why I'm after you so much right now for this minutiae. I think 2 years from now you'll just be able to go out on stage and play. It doesn't mean you won't miss something sometime. Or if it turns out you never miss, you'll maybe be the first cellist in the history to accomplish that.