In the beginning, this is to help establish what time feels like, to bring awareness to the differences between the experience of internal time and the reality of external time, the differences between what you hear in your head while sitting at the instrument and what listeners hear while sitting across the room from you when you play. And for that purpose, time is strict, mathematical, precise. Deviation from tempo is a mistake to be corrected, whether it’s slowing down because a passage is too tricky for a beginner’s fingers to manage at full speed, or speeding up because of the excitement of momentum, your fingers a perpetual motion machine becoming increasingly faster and in danger of crashing to a halt. Being grounded in time helps you bridge the gap between what you feel when you play and what people hear when you play it. It helps the player become a reliable narrator, a performer in control of the material, putting an audience at ease through the regularity of tempo, no inconsistent slowing and surging, no speeding up like a runaway train.
But later you learn—after years of having precision and stability and predictability and consistency ingrained in your fingers, your muscles, your ears, your brain, your body—that time is not strict, or rather that there is fluidity within its structure. It’s a bit like the moment you discover, after thinking for so long that numbers are static and progressive and inviolable, that one comes after zero and two comes after one, and that’s the way it works, that there is actually an infinity of numbers between zero and one, and one and two, and so on. There is an infinity of time between notes, no matter how rigidly the metronome insists otherwise, beating on and on, exactly so, and the job of a true musician is to understand how to play with that time, how to manipulate that time, how to play within it.
There is a law of conservation with time and music, just as there is with physics. The total time of a piece remains constant, and yet the time within it—stretching out a phrase for emphasis, condensing a passage to heighten its impact—is fluid. Any time you take from one place—slowing nearly imperceptibly as you resolve a chord, for instance—must be made up in another, otherwise the performance would be as rambling and uncontrolled and ramshackled and unpracticed as a beginner’s who doesn’t understand the importance of the larger consistency of time, and who thus cannot respect the infinities within it. But to be able to take those liberties, you must have a solid basis, a solid grounding, not only in the practical, literal, written score, but in the body, in the practiced muscles and ears and brain.
Early practice, the first approaches to a piece of music, if it’s done smartly and with an eye toward building a performance from a solid foundation, takes into account this fluidity of time, this infinity between each note, because early practice is slow practice. If revision is the heart of writing, then slow practice is the heart of playing. In slow practice, you can savor time, because you are outside of time. You can sink into each note, each chord, and allow your muscles to relax into place, allow your brain to align its pathways, new connections forming as you repeat and replay, because this, too, is the hallmark of early practice, and of being outside of time. Repetition, and slowness, and the gradual learning and relearning and telling and retelling of a pattern, of a process, of a progression.
This kind of work, this slow, deliberate work, outside of time but decidedly within it, taking place over a passage of time, is like recovery.
It is a kind of healing.
I have been outside of time, even as time passes, for so long with this illness, and with this recovery. Time, when I was leaking, was stasis: the ceiling above my bed, the walls of my room, nothing changing as I lay flat day after day. And yet all around me time was passing. I could hear the low whoosh of cars driving past outside my windows, the clock tower bells from City Hall chiming toward me some quiet days. My children, growing taller, becoming more and more themselves every day, outgrowing their clothes, their faces acquiring cheekbones, morphing into adult shapes. Nothing stopped merely because I stopped being able to participate in it. Even within my own body time continued its pace, blood circulating, fingernails growing, hair graying, monthly cycle cycling, all the cycles cycling of sleeping and waking and hunger and elimination. So I was suspended in time even as time continued around me and within me, I floated in the infinity between one note and the next, between one number and the next.
Can a self exist outside of time? When I was leaking, I felt as if I had no self. Or rather that the self I thought I always had been, and that had always been in charge, was in fact revealed to be a fiction, as imaginary and theoretical as in-between-numbers infinity. I had made the rookie mistake of confusing my mind for my brain: I thought that “I” was the driver of all my thoughts and decisions and actions. But, deprived of enough cerebrospinal fluid for my mind to function properly though my brain continued its work, it became clear that this “I,” this
