Meditation on Play: in the bleak mid-winter quarter

The days are growing longer again and it feels like new life is blowing through Evanston in that chill-you-to-the-bone wind off of Lake Michigan. Climate change has dazzled our brains into forgetting what a real Chicago winter has been in the past, though there have been moments when we have had to layer up to venture outside and leave the tap running at night so the pipes don’t freeze overnight. I don’t mind real winter weather.

The biggest adjustment is maybe the peace I have made with what I am able to accomplish within the expectations of self and professors. I have an overloaded schedule once again in order to accommodate my intensive Italian course- one of the courses I find to be most relevant to my professional development, though not a part of my degree coursework in any capacity. It is also one of the most fun, because it is made up of mostly 18-year-olds, and the three doctoral students. Language learning is very special because it forces you into a state of child-like vulnerability, unable to express your intellect or feelings, relying on basic communicative means and sentences until the language acquisition grows. It is basically a rebirth and adolescence in the context of another culture. One could choose to fight this joyful, though trying process by straining for perfection and retention of self-respect. Or, as our class has done, you can choose joy: delight in discovery, laughter in mistakes, and learning through play. Italian may be the first language that I have allowed myself to learn in the way, which speaks to the personal progress I have made in the past few years and even in the past few months, discovering who I am, whom I have always been, what kind of artist I am and what I care about.

I have always loved to laugh and play. This is why improv has been such an obvious match for me. I have noticed that I laugh more than most in improv classes- I love real, honest play in a way I don’t love planned cleverness. It can be no surprise that I have been drawn to improvised music forms as well, whether at Juilliard or in our family living room with my sister growing up (or on-going, for that matter- ask me about the human bagpipes sometime). 

Play is honest in a way that premeditated scripts can’t always be. There is discovery and risk. But is opera not one of the most formally premeditated performance art forms that exists? Wrangling so many people together to tell one story requires fastidious planning.

Recorded media often lacks a sense of play, simply because it is a means of putting an artform that formerly existed only temporally within a fixed, plastic, repeatable medium. If we demand that live performance is as “flawless” as recorded media, we may as well stop performing live.

In order to “grow up” and be “professional,” one is often encouraged to leave their childish play behind. Don’t talk or make jokes in class. Take practice and collaboration seriously. Set a good example. Seen and not heard. These aphorisms resound through my head, but now that I am aware of them, their power over me is lessening.

I am taking an experimental music class with Dr. Ryan Dohoney this quarter. After taking his Music Historiography class last quarter (both challenging and rewarding), he convinced me to take Experimentalism not because I had ever had any interest in “such music,” but because the format of the class promised discussion and performance, rather than passive learning. Discussion provides a safe space to process ideas out loud and to share in the discovery of colleagues. Performance allows you to put on the skin of characters and music and walk around in it for a while, immersing yourself in its world. Doing this with experimental music has been revelatory and freeing. I hear the echoes of well-meaning adults past while rubbing rocks together with a group of 10 other adults, “Don’t be silly Marie, or you will get in trouble;” while humming a pitch in a forest of musician trees, “Focus, Marie, don’t lose your pitch or you will mess this up for everyone;” while shredding and shaking paper, “This isn’t play time, this is music. Stop messing around and be serious!”

Isn’t that sad? That play has been trained out of musicians? That art must be serious? That collaboration depends on one’s ability to be perfect? Is it any wonder that this 31-year-old child is drawn to improv, to adult play? I went into the arts, into music only to discover that it is as professional and rigid as any institution or profession. Not the musicians. No, there is so much life in most of them, but it takes very special circumstances for them to let this life flow free and to play. In English and German the verb for playing a game and playing an instrument are the same. But in professional practice? Practice. Practice is the more accurate description of what we are trained to do as professional musicians.

Yours,

Marie