Inspiration from Silence
By Barry Green

Music is the only source of energy that I have known in my life
that gives humans a chance to be instantly transformed into spirit.-David Darling

Having recently completed my book, The Mastery of Music, there have been a series of events guiding me to what I feel is my ‘next professional step’ in my musical career. More recently it has taken the form of sleepless nights thinking about the process of creativity and the source of inspiration that fuels our musical lives. David Darling has re-entered my life (and my dreams) to help me realize this goal of developing my own understanding of the creative process and begin to use it in a new artistic way.
I went to college (Indiana University) with the cellist David Darling. Over the past 35 years our paths have crossed on the concert stages as musicians and educators, with me teaching Inner Game techniques, and David teaching his unique style of free improvisation.

David’s story made me dream to be like him.

Over 30 years ago, David told me how he discovered his gift for improvising. When he began to work with Paul Winter there was a time in every concert where David was asked to play a solo. The first time this happened, Paul shoved Dave out on stage and said: “Go play—it’s your solo.” David didn’t have anything prepared to play, so he sat down in front of all those people and just made something up. This was his start. I listened to this story with such envy.

That was my dream. Here I have played my bass for over 40 years and sometimes I say I don’t have anything prepared when I'm asked to perform. If I have nothing ready, I’m paralyzed. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, to be able to get up and just play from my heart—David planted that seed in me over twenty years ago and now I’m following his path. He keeps coming back into my life. I’m not sure where this is taking me but I know that I’m hooked. There is the expression: ‘Be careful what you ask for’. Well, I wasn’t very careful, I asked for it, and now I’m in it. In fact, I’m kind of obsessed.

I had a profound experience writing my final chapter in The Mastery of Music on the subject of Creativity. I knew that my next step would be to follow this path. I’m fascinated with the creative process. I’m excited to learn more about the inspirational voice through improvisation and composition. I’m determined to follow this inspiration in my next step.

However, I’m feeling inadequate to do this with my less than professional skills in improvisation and creativity. In The Mastery of Music, I interviewed over 120 great artists, exploring their excellence through ten qualities of the human spirit, such as passion, creativity, and communication. When writing this book, most of the information came from those being interviewed. Yes, I take credit for organizing, editing, paraphrasing and putting in some of my own ideas, but most of the good stuff still came from the guest interviews rather than from my own perspective. I call this writing more from the ‘outside-in’.

For my next step in the field of creativity, I don’t want to research the field of creativity from the outside looking in. I’d like to do this with a different balance including more of my own personal experience in this field of creativity. I want this sojourn in creativity, realizing my dreams to come BOTH from my own experience AND from embracing the experience and wisdom of others. I want to be a participant so that I am also an example of this creativity. I have had these dreams of playing improvisational music. This is why I know I can do this. I want to make it real for me when I’m not dreaming.

What follows is an account of my experience at David Darling's workshop on the “Art of Improvisation”.

FREDONIA NEW YORK: The Art of Improvisation, with David Darling
It was time to learn some of the rules for opening the channels to creativity. I didn’t want to approach workshop as the ‘author’ of the Inner Game and Mastery of Music or even a symphony bassist. I came to be a student. I came to learn.

Because I was flying from San Francisco to Pittsburgh and driving over four hours to Fredonia, I arrived a little late for the opening Sunday evening session. Standing in the back I waved to David with a room full of some of the weirdest looking people I have seen in a long time. I thought California had the monopoly on these strange looking folks but here I was in New York. It would only take about 24-36 hours for these strange unfamiliar faces to transform into the most beautiful people I had ever met. Soon I would see right into their hearts and souls and they would be open to me in the same way. These strange faces were now my new community of loving, friendly and, yes, beautiful people.

The Art of Improvisation course is sub-titled most appropriately “Return to Child” and it really successfully brings us to that youthful place of amazement and discovery. David’s coaching style is designed to evoke group responses of amazement, love, humor, and extreme exaltation, including ‘freaking out’. I loved acting absolutely crazy with my voice, hands, bass, and screaming at the top of my lungs.

When you are in this child-like state, it promotes an egoless involvement in every hour of the day. Call and response—David sings it, shouts it, plays it, demonstrates it, and we follow. It is simple imitation. Easy to do and easy to experience. David wears many faces with the sole exception of a pompous virtuoso-master teacher. And he has every right to wear that one! David actually participates in the small group classes led by the leaders who have been trained in David’s Music for People Leadership program. David is keeping things on track, throwing in exercises, adding new concepts, keeping people humble and honest, bringing out the yang energy. Boy, can he get the adrenaline flowing. David has this humor thing going, helping us to laugh at our self, laugh with others, laugh at laughing. It feels so good to let it go. We use the term: FREAK OUT. It reminds me of the heavy metal distortion of electric guitars in rock music. We so seldom do this with classical or even jazz music, but when we do it feels so good!!!

One of the techniques we learned was to respect, honor and make room for our softer or less experienced music partners. We learned how to give signals to others when it was time to play, and how to listen to the music to know when something needed to change. Besides these technical skills, I would have my ‘clairvoyance’ antennas activated. I was being primed for tuning into true inspiration. I could play my bass, and as David taught us, I could sing what I play (most of the time), but now I was to learn how to listen, not to myself, but to the silence inspiring my fingers to move unconsciously. This was new for me. Getting to know ‘silence’ would turn out to be one of the most important things I would learn about the creative process.

In the first ‘breakout’ ensemble session, I learned about some powerful forms for creating solos, holding harmony notes, listening and supporting other solos. Then we would have free improvisations that would be interesting. In the beginning it sounded a lot like unorganized confusion, with everyone playing by themselves without listening to the others. This was what we learned NOT to do. Sometimes it was frustrating and even silly. But then out of the chaos, people would become bored with this sound and naturally search for something more interesting. A solo would emerge. An accompaniment would come out of a simple repeated rhythm, and sometimes others were content to provide a gentle harmonic backdrop. Music would emerge out of this chaos, sometimes out of necessity. Then people would be instructed that this was not an accident and we would strive to pay attention to some rules of listening.

The integrity of the playing was amazing. What I had previously heard from David was absolutely true. I was hearing world-class music making coming from some individuals who were not professional musicians. Kids were playing with adults. Amateurs were playing with more accomplished musicians. If you listened with your eyes closed, you would never know who was a kid or an amateur. It was intense and exhausting listening to such great music. Amazing performances were happening with almost every group. I would witness magical, ethereal harmonic textures followed by ethnic percussion grooves that had such a profound impact on my body and soul. I felt like dancing or cheering the improvisers while they played. I was also learning that the less experienced participants had an equal access to incredibly impressive and inspiring music-making. After hearing some of these strange looking musicians play, they were quickly losing their surface appearance and rapidly transforming into very normal looking people. This was powerful stuff. I was getting swept up in this sumptuous pool of musical personalities.

In the larger group classes many groups would play and receive feedback or serve as models for teaching different musical forms like ‘one quality sound’, ‘solo and drone’, ‘solo and ostinato’, ‘groove’ etc. One of the exercises includes a physical preparation just before a group begins to play. Each player takes a large breath while raising their hands above their heads, then exhaling while dropping their hands into the playing position. This prepares the space, time, and body for the music. While I think this was wonderful, I still noticed some people rushing through the drill and diving in the music without waiting in silence for a true inspiration of sound. This seemed to be the most critical skill in playing music that comes from our inner spirit.
What I was learning was to enjoy the space and silence before I played and even during my playing. I was learning to wait for the moment when my fingers would move by themselves. Patience has never been my virtue. Now it was becoming my friend. I was learning to wait to hear someone else play. I was learning to listen to how I could support or accompany a soloist so that they could be heard. I was learning to fit a rhythm pattern into a groove. I was discovering when to stop playing a certain way and to go in a different direction, changing the energy or letting the energy build.

This week at 'The Art of Improvisation,' I’m learning these musical highs are available to me in every part of the day. In every class, every small session, every individual is willing to jam with me at any time. At almost every musical improvisation, something special happens. The remainder of the week was filled with emotional, profound musical experiences as well as invaluable techniques to learn the art of improvisation. By the end of the week, I was physically exhausted but existing on an emotional roller coaster. I realized how much I not only learned but what I had forgotten since beginning to play my bass over 40 years ago.

I had been doing this with passion and compassion all week but so many years had passed since I had felt this love for music and the freedom to express myself with my bass. I was reuniting and rediscovering my bass in a new way. I was returning to the child-like love I had for music when I first started to play.

GIVING BACK: Friday Morning final Session:
The concluding morning session consists of a final ‘play around’ with everyone sitting in a group and doing an improvisation. This was followed by David’s concluding remarks, a closing circle and the much anticipated so called ‘non-emotional’ farewell.

I asked David Darling if I could do a presentation before the final closing circle. The presentation would involve David playing his cello, Barbara dancing, Katherine Weider singing, Ron Kravitz on percussion, and Catherine playing piano, while I did some readings from The Mastery of Music. I wanted to share the words of some great composers and scholars about the source of musical inspiration. I wanted to underscore the uniqueness of the inspiration we had been experiencing in the house that David had built. While everyone experienced the grace of these magical moments, I felt a need to share a description of this from some of the great minds of our musical history. David graciously consented.

For me to ask David to actually lead a session was one thing I swore I would never do in this week. I was determined to keep my mouth shut, not be an ‘Inner Game of Music’ or MOM author or symphony bassist, but just a hungry student blending in with every opportunity to learn and participate. However, by the end of that week, I felt like I was no longer any different than anyone else in the program. And I was inspired to say something from my heart, not from my professional experience. I also was so impacted and grateful for this transformative week that I wanted to give something back. In this spirit, I felt I could offer this contribution to the closing session and that it would fit into the program not coming from my ego but my heart.

During the week I was bothered by one thing. David would often use the word ‘God’ when talking about inspiration. The ‘G’ word is of course something that can push different people’s buttons, but David was able to get away with it quite gracefully. While I will not lecture specifically about God in a music course, I did want to present what others have said about the source of their musical inspirations. For many centuries great composers and theorists have embraced an infinite consciousness—the ‘music of the spheres’. Here we have spent an entire week, hour after hour bathed in grace with the undeniable beauty of this musical inspiration. Performance after performance received guidance to the most perfect harmonies, the most exciting rhythms, the most amazing melodies that could not have possibly been written. I believe we have all been inspired by a state of consciousness that allows this beauty to pass through us.

While this has been my experience, I felt that many colleagues were less aware of this happening to them. I would see participants perform the preparatory breath and arm circle in advance of an improvisation and then jump right in playing notes as opposed to waiting for that moment in silence when the music comes to you and through you.

David describes this state of silence in an interview with Jim Oshinsky for the handbook Return to Child. David said:

Sitting quietly, paying attention to what sounds come from the exhale when you pay attention to your breath. That exhale is our magic, that’s the connection to the Infinite. The form comes out of actually sitting quietly, doing nothing, having no purpose and then taking a breath. In our connection to the universe, you let the sounds come out and then listen deeply to how it feels to you. And when one is able to receive this process in such a way that one is not negative, but one is just listening, that listening experience will change one's life. After a while, it’s not hard to step in there right away, and you’re in this magic place, a spiritual place that we call the Infinite.

I wanted to give homage to this silent experience by citing examples from great artists like David describing this phenomenon. I felt I could do this by speaking from my heart, and playing a recorded interview of Joshua Bell’s own attempt at putting into words the inspiration that calms him before his first entrance in the Beethoven Violin Concerto. Bell talks of surrendering to a ‘God-like’ Beethoven, because ”Beethoven knows it so much better than anyone could ever know.”

After I played Joshua Bells words, I spoke from my heart and told the workshop that this was the most powerful musical experience of my lifetime. I never spoke so slowly and with such focus and determination as I did that morning. I said that, while I had just finished writing a book from 120 world famous musicians about mastery and artistry in music, I could have written that book from all the participants in this Art of Improvisation course. Because what they have been doing and experiencing this week, hour after hour, day after day is what the great masters and virtuosos try to do, but only succeed occasionally. And I believe the reason for this is because David Darling has provided the space and the context and some simple tools to access this inspiration that Joshua Bell has gleamed from Beethoven.
Then I asked Catherine and the musicians to begin to play music that felt appropriate to the readings while I quoted from Gunther Schuller and Terry Riley about the music of the cosmos, the spiritual energy that is available to everyone at any time—that one can access by asking and listening for its guidance.

From The Mastery of Music:
One of life’s joys is to fully experience our connection to this inner voice that inspires us to continue to grow and learn as human beings. It is a rushing crystalline current that is available to anyone who chooses to acknowledge its existence. This song is alive in us; this voice will never stop singing.
You don’t have to be Joshua Bell to hear and play with this grace. I concluded saying the Journey goes on and on and on--repeating those words into silence when the church bells in the community went off in synchronized harmony. We sat in silence, an unforgettable moment of humble love.

This week is the beginning of a new path for me. I will be forever changed and grateful. I hope this journey will never end. BG

Barry Green and David Darling will present a 6-day course sponsored by Young Imaginations in co-operation with Music for People called “INSPIRATION IN MUSIC, Exploring Creativity and Improvisation in Performance and Education.”
The course will be held at Holy Names University, in Oakland California July 24-30, 2005. Further details check MFP website and/or Barry Green’s website @ www.innergameofmusic.com after Jan 1, 2005.