The Well Aging Fiddler: Summer Reading Recommendations, Outside the Fiddle Box

By Michael Kennedy: Let’s step out of our collective fiddle-focused boxes and look at what else is going on in the world. I offer six books and a video. You will notice none of these directly address playing a violin or technique when it comes to classical music - but these are works that will likely stimulate your imagination. And sometimes we need that, more than the hours in the practice room! One book looks at theater, one addresses the challenges of archery, one looks at jazz, two books teach writing poetry, another book is about getting through your day, and a video illustrates the beauty and fragility of time. And yet, the information they offer gives metaphorical observations on theater, jazz, poetry, art, and the pursuit of artistic clarity. First, we’ll set the tone with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, to gain a personal but broad overview of how we approach life and art. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180. Hence, this book is almost 2,000 years old, and well worth reading. I heard of this book when I watched a video of Jerry Seinfeld discussing how he reads one or two pages of Meditations each day as inspiration for his life. The book is wonderfully basic. Don’t let things get to you, enjoy your life, and lighten up. That’s pretty much it. Not bad for a Roman emperor, eh? Well worth it. Now, let’s look at an approach to artistic craft with a book that deals with the effectiveness of artistic communication. What is predictable? What is narrow but still effective? What brings joy? What links us with mystery and changes us with an artistic experience? Here it is. I can’t think of any book that has had a bigger influence on my life than Peter Brook’s The Empty Space. This short book is based on a series of four lectures Brook gave at universities in 1968 regarding the world of theater. The book discussed Deadly Theater or safe, predictable and uninspired theater, Holy Theater, or theater intended for a specific audience, Rough Theater or basic theater for the sole purpose of entertainment, and Immediate Theater or that magic moment when the actor, the play, and the audience blend so invisibly and timelessly that the moment comes and goes, burning into everyone’s imaginations. Moving our collective lens closer in a search for that experience that burns into us like water, I offer Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigel. I was given this book during an acting class and told to take the word "archery" and pretend it is the word "acting". Zen in the Art of Archery doesn’t teach how to shoot an arrow into a target. The book deals with that Zen quality of knowing when to shoot the arrow. In other words, when to connect with the audience, when to live in the moment, and when to have confidence in the release. It’s a short book. You can read it in an hour and walk away seeing the world with different eyes. Do you write poetry? Read poetry? Understand poetry? I hope so. I hope you’ve realized there is an entire universe speaking in poems beyond middle school exercises in iambic pentameter, "proper" Haikus, and roses are red. I challenge you to put down your bow, pick up a pencil, grab some paper, and write some poems. To help you wrestle with your poems I offer a book on writing free verse poetry, and another book digging into more structured poems. The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser offers excellent advice on writing free-verse poetry. Kooser won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry and was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2004 – 2006. Kooser shows how to write and understand poetry in a way that opens ideas and paves paths to greater understanding. While Kooser focuses on free verse, Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled celebrates metered verse in all its glory, humor, purpose, and challenge without reservations. He takes poetry beyond assumptions into the world of why a writer would use a 10-meter line as opposed to a shorter or longer line. He shows why it’s fine to twist things around, when to stay the course, and when to go wild. This book opens the discipline of metered poetry into the world of ideas. If anything, the chapter on limericks with its bawdy, irreverent, and wonderfully and embarrassingly hilarious, limerick poems is worth the cost of the whole book. Speaking of writing, let’s go in another direction. Let’s blast the entire experience wide open and let our thoughts explode. When the great jazz saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, was at the peak of his career in 1959, out of dissatisfaction with his work he stopped performing. For three years, he took a sabbatical to study, explore, and most wonderfully, play his saxophone for up to 15 hours a day under a bridge in New York City. During that time and for many years after that he kept notebooks of his ideas. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, edited by Sam V.H. Reese, is a short volume, offering Rollins insights through his musical journey. Like any good notebook it’s messy, technical, pithy, and thought-provoking. None of these books should be rushed through. Indeed, you will probably want to highlight passages that speak to you. Sip these books. Hang on to them and reread them. They open doors. Now, let’s bring it all together. Looking at art that can hopefully produce a transformative experience, something that can fly at us and land dead center within our core, something poetic, free, and yet disciplined, I urge you to watch the video, Rivers and Tides: Working with Time, a video about the artist, Andy Goldsworthy. I think it’s available on Amazon Prime. This is a beautiful film about an artist with a wonderful imagination, sense of space, and respect for time. Through the discipline of only working with natural objects – rocks, leaves, ice, and so forth – Goldsworthy creates wonderful objects. Some exist for years, while others last only minutes. This is a wonderful metaphor for music and all artistic ventures. You might also like:

• Book Review: The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb
• Book Review: Jeremy Denk’s Musical Love Story
• Music Practice Makeover - Interview with Christine Goodner

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