To Fail is Simply To Succeed Undesirably

You may have heard it before. An inspirational quote that you brush aside as idealistic and corny.

"There is no such thing as a failure. If you fail to do something one way, you succeed in doing it another way."

Now the word failure is kind of curious in the same way that the number zero is curious. They both describe states of non-being. Any mathematician knows that zero is a concept, like infinity, and that it can reasoned with but not explicitly observed. The problem with the word failure is that it is entirely dependent upon its antonym: success.

Success, in verb form, is defined as "achieving a desired outcome". So then we could reasonably say that the opposite of success would be simply the negation: "not achieving a desired outcome."

But you can't really not-achieve something, can you? You can't have zero apples. You can describe your condition as "a state of not possessing apples" but you can't actually have no apples. In other words, you can "not have apples" but you cannot "have no apples."

(These funny little distinctions occur in many situations where you have a negation that depends an occurrence not occurring. Like right and wrong, for example. Something is only right if it is not wrong, and vice versa.)

One literally cannot fail. Instead, we successfully do something that is not desired. Every living moment of our lives is spent doing something, even if that something is sleeping, watching TV, committing a crime, getting stage fright, oversleeping an alarm, etc.

Is it real to say that there is no such thing as failure, or is this simply another way to rearrange and redesign the syntax to reflect more light? In truth it is both, because reality is in the eye of the beholder. As humans we have lots of little ways to weave our perceptions into a unique web which is spun befittingly to our environment, culture, personal limitations, childhood, and just about every event that affects us.

So why is it important to make this distinction at all?

Because it neutralizes events to be on the same plane. When you realize that the dichotomy doesn't exist as you thought it did, you can more easily traverse from the realization of one event to the realization of another, more desirable one.

Of course I will relate this to music, since this is a music blog. Say that I am about to attempt to play a phrase of music. Lying before me, in the seconds that it will take to play the phrase, are literally an infinite number of paths which my life-events might take. A precious few are desired (namely, that I play the phrase and play it in a manner that I deem "successful"), and countless others are undesired (which include all the musical things that could go wrong, as well as a sudden coughing fit of varying lengths, my dog throwing up on my foot and distracting me, an asteroid hitting my house, and everything in between). Each path has a different probability of occurring in those moments, with some of the probabilities much larger than others and some infinitesimally small. They are, however, all instances of something succeeding in happening. It is important to understand that probability of something happening is 1, and it leaves no room for nothing to happen.

Every thing that happens in my day teaches me something. If it is desired I learn how to replicate the experience, and if it is undesired I also learn how to replicate the experience, although in future I might decide not to. Some people when reading this post might think that this concept is indeed true but just not really applicable to the way that we think and live our day-to-day lives. In my experience as both an unhappy and a happy person, I've learned that an unhappy person will tend to scorn the one who preaches kindness and positive thinking, believing that the optimist is jaded and undeserving of the fortune to feel peacefully.

The relaxation of pride and the strength to adapt unequivocally from your undesired successes is freedom of the spirit, and the freedom to weave the web of your life's events into the shape that you want.

Breathing: Positive vs. Negative Space

If you'll allow me a brief foray into visual art technique...I promise it will serve to strengthen a useful metaphorical concept for wind players!

The concept of positive vs. negative space is widely known and used in the visual arts, including media design, photography, and basically anything that you are meant to look at in a scrutinizing manner. We call the positive space the figure and the negative space the ground. If you are not familiar with the concept of negative space, it is briefly and very basically this:

The background of an image that is in focus.


So for a simple example, in the picture below it is very clear what is the positive space (the Ferris Wheel and cabins), and the negative space is a meaningless background (sky and clouds).

A problem occurs when we artfully design the negative space to be more meaningful, and in the very famous example below, what is called a figure-ground reversal occurs, and the negative space may take on meaning to the eye. An interesting note of human limitation: if the reversal is executed perfectly, it can be impossible to see both meanings simultaneously. You may know it is there, but our eyes may only focus on one figure at a time.

Some visual artists have taken the concept to an incredible extreme, creating masterpieces of figure-ground reversal. One of the most famous artists to toy with the notions of physical dimensions and positive-negative space was M.C. Escher.

All this to bring us to the veritable art itself that is breathing technique for wind musicians. Breathing is one of the "ground floor" slabs on which the stability of the entire structural development stands. Breathing is so useful a concept in general musicality that non-wind musicians are often taught to breathe in cooperation with the music they are playing, to bring the concept of a good phrase to the realm of our natural physiology.

So how does this relate to positive and negative space?

For analogical purposes I'll say that both the inhale and exhale actions are our figure in wind playing. They are the positive and purposeful actions that we focus on, and on which we spend hours of practice perfecting. The negative space is everything else that may occur that is not either an inhalation of exhalation. Essentially, the ground in our case is holding our breath, or performing a Valsalva Maneuver (defined as an attempt to force exhalation through a closed airway, like when we "pop" our ears on an airplane).

In the painted picture called A Wind Player Breathing, we have a very strong focus on the nature of the positive space, and unfortunately I think too often do we ignore what might be happening in the cracks of the picture. Little instances of breath-holding and Valsalva are hiding there, contributing meaninglessness to the art that you are trying to create. In most cases, the meaninglessness actually contributes negatively to the picture-painting process.

The act of playing an instrument should be 100% full of the positive breathing actions. We either exhale or we inhale. Either/or is a very important distinction because without it we leave cracks for the negative space to fill. I find that when I pay very careful attention to my breathing I notice tiny moments of something else, and those little moments can be disastrous to a brass player should they occur inopportunely.

I think you'll find that the feeling of breathing with only inhalations and exhalations to be different. It takes some practice to feel natural, but it is an important springboard for the musical development of wind players. 

Time and the Circle

It has been creeping up on me for quite a while now. It was, however, only recently that this instinct found an audible voice and began to apply itself to my playing and teaching regularly. It is the concept of musical time as it relates to the circle.

Regardless of meter, complexity of rhythm, tempo and other extraneous musical parameters, circles find their way into my thoughts when I play. Not present and practiced, but more like the way we think about a memory, with careful and unintentional yet unavoidable avoidance of any true clarity. Circles represent to me wholesomeness, regularity, continuation, and flexibility in the same manner that does the passage of time.

Circles are what makes the wheel, and the wheel moves in a consistent manner according to its external influences, and will, barring some catastrophic interference, change speed in a very predictable manner. If the slope on which the wheel is rolling changes its angle, the wheel will accelerate or decelerate, but only at exactly the rate which corresponds to the forces that presently act upon it. In our physics analogy of the day, these forces are the "gravity" of the music (the baseline tempo which "grounds" us), the "friction" of the medium (the performer and his personal range of difficulties, whether they are breathing, digital dexterity, etc.), and the "slope" of the music (cadential tension is a common cause of "upward slopes", or slowing down, while augmentation of key, musical anxiety, and many other factors could cause a "downward slope", or acceleration). Wheels roll, and given a surface environment of zero friction (which we simulate with a conductor or metronome) will continue onward at a constant speed. In addition, if you were to watch the wheel move in slow-motion, the exact same part of the wheel would make a full rotation at a perfectly regular interval. This is, in full essence, playing with good time.

An ostinato pattern played with perfect groove in the most tailored of pockets will demonstrate what it means to make a circle, or a loop, in music. But even outside of this obvious context, if you listen to a performer playing with perfect "time," you can almost feel the circles inside the sound.

I have been sharing with my students an exercise which I have invented to help fish this concept from the murky mind-waters to our actual senses. I have found categorically that the students with the best sense of rhythm and time are immediately better with the exercise than those with a faltering concept of rhythm. This supports the value of the exercise, and it is simple and as follows:

1) Put a metronome or constant source of tempo on whichever speed you desire

2) Draw circles that repeat themselves once every measure (you decide the time signature). In other words, the pencil or pen reaches the topmost point of the circle at the downbeat of a new measure, but does not hesitate and continues immediately to draw another circle. The pencil does not leave the paper.
3) The point of the exercise is the draw circles in a consistent manner (that is, without speeding up or slowing down the actual drawing of the circle) and that are exactly the same size and same position on the paper.

There are a lot of variations to the exercise that are valuable and eye-opening, in my opinion, so if you try it feel free to be creative. My favorite variations include randomly altering the time signature starting at the top of the circle/measure (this is very difficult to do the first time correctly!), and having someone else steadily change the tempo in a particular direction. Also, leaving just one audible beat per measure is like extra credit and requires really good subdivision.

Finally, I have made a couple of observations when performing and teaching this exercise. One is that circles are a shape that is much more consistent to good time keeping than polygons are (triangles for 3/4, pentagons for 5/4, etc.). Polygons subdivide the measure for you into exact points, and in music we just don't get clear downbeats all the time. (P.S. Writing little marks about the downbeats in your music is a crutch and doesn't help your sight-reading!). In addition, I've noticed that drawing a polygon causes you to hesitate just slightly at the corners of the shape, and consequently have a burst of acceleration directly thereafter. One might say that the circle has no angles and therefore does not support subdivision, however, truthfully a circle has essentially an infinite amount of pivoting points, so the subdivision is the most intense, and will basically be at the highest level that you personally can manage to keep track of.

Try it!