The Conscious Musician

By Paulina Derbez

The Conscious Musician is a work that intends to completely modify the perception that teachers, parents and students have of the teaching/learning of music. Paulina Derbez has applied her own experience to weave a text that is at the same time a study manual and a synthesis of the real meaning of making music. “Only if we understand, as she has, t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Editorial Ink
• Release date: Feb 14, 2019

Paulina Derbez

Inició sus estudios de violín en la Academia Yuriko Kuronuma. Viajó a Lugano, Suiza, para realizar estudios de perfeccionamiento en el Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana, bajo la tutela de Carlo Chiarappa, y en la Academia D’ Archi Vivaldi con la maestra Susan Holm. En tres ocasiones fue becada por el FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes). Ha realizado conciertos en países como Japón, Colombia, Francia, Italia, Alemania, Canadá y México, entre otros, como solista y en ensambles camerísticos y sinfónicos. Ha creado música para espectáculos teatrales tales como El Ave Fénix, producción suiza en donde también destacó como actriz, y para el espectáculo de danza Cuerpo impulso, el cual se presentó en el Harbour Front Centre Festival de Toronto, Canadá. Es la creadora del método de pedagogía musical ''El músico consciente''. Ha impartido cursos en la Escuela Rudolf Steiner de Lugano, Suiza, el Festival Internacional de Música de Morelia, la Academia Yuriko Kuronuma de la Ciudad de México, entre otras instituciones. Actualmente radica en Toronto, Canadá donde es miembro de la Ontario Philharmonic, bajo la tutela del director de talla internacional Marco Parissotto, y del Ensamble de Música Contemporánea Pulse. En 2012 estrenó con gran éxito su concierto multidisciplinario unipersonal Shika: out of the silence the sound is born, en la Universidad de Toronto.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publication of The Conscious Musician has been possible thanks to all the people who have contributed to both my professional and my personal development over the years. I am deeply grateful to María Rosas for believing in this book and to the publishing house Editorial Ink for making it available to readers. I thank Silvia, my mother, for having introduced me to the wonderful world of music and for her support over all these years. I offer my sincere thanks to all my music and violin teachers, especially Carlo Chiarappa, for having inspired me to create a new way of studying an instrument, and to Fides Krucker for transforming my relationship with music, voice and violin. I would also like to thank Marco Parisotto, Mónica Anguiano, Aarón Bitrán, Fabienne Tamó, Gabriel Pliego and Federico Bañuelos for taking the time to read the manuscript of The Conscious Musician and offer me their valuable feedback. I also offer my thanks to Adarsa Chakra sensei, who taught me the art of Zen Shiatsu, a practice that has a latent and profound relationship with the world of music, and to Crystal Pomeroy for her friendship and instruction, which has been so important to my personal and professional development. And finally, I offer my eternal gratitude to my husband, Martin Boyd, for his unconditional support and for having accompanied me in the birth, development and completion of The Conscious Musician.

For Martin and Isabella

PROLOGUE

Jorge Volpi

I have worked in the field of literature for more than twenty-five years, and yet I have always considered myself, more than anything else, a musician. A frustrated musician. Three or four years before making the decision to become a writer, when I was only thirteen, I discovered music –or, rather, rediscovered it– thanks to a few conversations with one of my school friends. At that age, my friend was already an expert in classical music and, to my amazement, not only knew the names of a few composers (my father would always have us listen to Beethoven, Mozart or Verdi at dinner time and make us guess which work was by which composer), but could also distinguish all manner of subtleties that were lost on me; and, to top it all, he had a huge collection of records, especially of Mahler and Bruckner. My adolescent desire to compete with this friend drew me into a unique appreciation of music, to the point that to this day I continue to consider it the greatest of all the arts –far superior, I regret to confess, to writing stories and novels-.

But even then I was a frustrated musician, and my discovery of concert music at that time was really a rediscovery, because much earlier, between the ages of five and ten, my parents tried to get me to learn to play various instruments. In all cases, they failed. After long hours at school, the last thing I wanted to do with my afternoons was to try to learn to play tunes by heart or study harmonic rules that essentially meant nothing to me. By the time I was ten, I gave up on learning to play a musical instrument forever. Forever? Perhaps not, because after reading Paulina Derbez’s book I am now certain that at some point in the future I will have to make up for the time lost all those years ago.

In any event, as fate had it, some years later my first job was as coordinator of academic affairs –class schedules, grades and related matters– at the Escuela de Música Vida y Movimiento, one of the best music schools of its day in Mexico City. This job not only gave me the chance to be close to music once again (I very much enjoyed the orchestra’s rehearsals, for example), but also allowed me to make some of the best friends I’ve ever had

–all of them professional musicians–.

Among these was Paulina Derbez, who, with her sisters, formed an inseparable trio. She was, even then, one of the most talented and gifted students in the school, even if her formal education had been, to say the least, somewhat unusual. The daughter of a renowned psychologist, she had been home-schooled, which gave her and her sisters an air of strangeness that was not without its attraction. Subsequently, as she herself tells us in The Conscious Musician, she went to live in Switzerland to complete her studies, and shortly afterwards I would do the same in Spain.

Since then, our paths have crossed only occasionally, with brief meetings in Mexico between her travels or mine. When she wrote to me and mentioned that she had written a book, I couldn’t help but be surprised. And all the more when I finished reading it, not only because it is a stunning work, destined to change the perception of music teaching held by parents, teachers and students completely, but also because its approach, focusing on the brain and the emotions, coincided with themes that have always fascinated me and that appear in a book –a work in many senses parallel to Paulina’s– that I have written about the brain and literary fiction (Leer la mente).

In The Conscious Musician, Paulina Derbez has applied her own experience as a music student and teacher, and as a professional performer, to produce a work that is at once a study manual and a rich exploration of what it truly means to make music. Only when we understand, as she does, that music is neither a simple form of amusement nor an obligation, neither a mindless pleasure nor a mere display of technical prowess, but, as she suggests, a fundamental part of human life, and of our inner lives, will we be able to comprehend its importance. And to become, perhaps, not only conscious musicians, but intelligent and sensitive listeners.

Its structure in two parts –theory and practice– allows for an in-depth reflection on the nature of the music, while also providing many valuable tips on how to study it and play it. Every musical problem is resolved first at the mental level: this fact, discovered in a moment of frustration, changed Derbez’s perspective on her art forever, and perfectly sums up the focus of her book. Indeed, music is located in the brain, and nowhere else. Thinking music, hearing it –and playing it– in our minds is an indispensable process to be able to then turn it into a part of reality.

The Conscious Musician picks apart many basic notions about music that habit or inertia have rendered stagnant and that are in urgent need of rethinking. From the nature of sound itself to the definition of feeling, viewing music as a bridge connecting the world and human consciousness, Paulina Derbez dusts off old concepts, revitalizing our appreciation of them while at the same time applying them in useful exercises that will no doubt help many music students to avoid the pitfalls frustration, stress and stage fright, to enjoy and experience music, to understand it and in so doing, over time, to become not only better performers but perhaps even better human beings.

The Conscious Musician is a book that will be useful not only for music students and professionals, but for anyone who wants to know about and enjoy more fully all the wonders that music has to offer. I am sure that if I’d read it in time, I would not be a frustrated musician today. Indeed, now that I have read it, I am a little less so. And for that I must thank Paulina Derbez.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

There are moments in life when we make decisions without knowing exactly where they might lead us. But we make them because we feel that they are what we need in order to grow in our lives. This is what happened to me at the age of 19, when I decided to pack my bags and follow that inner voice that some call intuition. In January of 1993, I boarded a plane that took me from Mexico –where I had lived all my life until then– to a place called Lugano in the Swiss Alps.

Lugano is a small city located in Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland. Surrounded by lakes and mountains, it is a breathtakingly beautiful city. Yet I couldn’t appreciate its beauty when I first arrived. I was so nervous and unsure about what awaited me that I only saw an unknown and hostile place.

I was picked up at the airport by the man who would be my violin teacher for the next three years, and, without knowing it, the key person who contributed to the creation of a new form of studying and perceiving the world of music.

After a while I began to adapt to Lugano and to my new situation. The classes with my new teacher were going well. In the first six months he worked exclusively on improving my technique, as he did with all his students. At that time I was living with a very kind Italian family and living off a scholarship to pursue my studies at the conservatory. Everything seemed to be going so well.

When I had finished the term dedicated exclusively to technique, my teacher assigned me a piece of music to play. I went home to Mexico for two months, where I had to prepare the piece for the next academic term. It was at that moment that I realized something I’d never noticed before... I didn’t know how to study! The more I repeated the piece, one way or another, the more my mental and physical tensions seemed to pile up. Preparing the piece thus seemed almost impossible because all the problems with my way of studying prior to my term of technique began rearing their ugly heads, one after another, and I had no idea how to resolve them. I was also terrified at the thought of returning to Switzerland because I knew, in the depth of my being, that on arriving in Lugano I would have to climb a huge mountain: I would have to face up to the fact that I didn’t know how to study. In spite of this fear, I knew I had to go back. Once more I listened to the voice of intuition, which led me to take the flight back to Lugano.

On my return to Switzerland, everything was different. I wasn’t living with the nice Italian family anymore; instead, I was sharing a house with some other students who were hardly ever there. I felt terribly lonely and sad, and terrified at the thought of climbing the big mountain that loomed ahead of me. My study method in those days consisted mainly of repeating the musical passages over and over, playing them slower and then faster, or vice versa. I had no idea at all about how to use my mind, emotions and body in my daily study. As a result, I suffered from severe muscle tensions, arising from mental and emotional tension, whenever I played violin. This was my situation when I arrived at my first class of the term with my teacher. I felt extremely nervous and fearful of making a mistake. And my fears seemed well-founded, as I began making one mistake after another. My teacher got impatient and told me that if I didn’t improve my technique and expression by the next class I shouldn’t even come back. Obviously, this made me feel much worse, and I left the class in tears. This scene was repeated in subsequent classes, and my desire to study plummeted. For my teacher it was a given that I had to arrive at class with the material well prepared, like all the other students who studied in his classes, which were always open to the public. But for me, the reality was very different. I had no idea how to tackle a piece to achieve the result he expected. This made me feel frustrated and upset both in class and in my practice at home. It was as if my own inner strength was asleep. My apparent lack of preparation began to exasperate my teacher and turned most of my classes with him at that time into torture for both of us. Nevertheless, it was thanks to this difficult period of my life as a student that my mind began to wake up. I realized that I wasn’t playing as well as I really could and that I had to do something about it. I thus began a period of searching that led to me to my goal: the creation of a new study method that would teach me to play with my true artistic potential.

This desire to do something to improve my way of playing started provoking some drastic changes in my subconscious. As a result of this and because of the tension accumulated over those years I developed an injury in one of my hands that forced me to stop playing violin for two months. I turned to alternative therapies and completed a course in eurhythmic dance in an effort to heal my hand. Fortunately, I felt more relaxed as it was summer vacation, which allowed me to take it easy and dedicate my time to myself and to my recovery.

On one of those summer days I was walking down the street, reflecting on why I suffered so many tensions when I played and what was keeping me from enjoying my daily study. When I got home I felt an impulse to pick up my violin and play. The moment I picked up my instrument, the familiar sensation of insecurity began to besiege me. When I started playing, my teacher’s voice echoed in my mind. I felt as if he were there judging me for every mistake I made even before I made them! I realized that his negative attitude toward me was so strong that I had internalized it as a part of my musical reality. Suddenly, the following thought came into my head:

Every technical or musical problem is resolved first at the mental level

It was a glorious moment of awakening for me. I had hit upon the key that would start me off on a completely new way of approaching study. I felt happy, because I knew right then that a change was going to come. It was a change that would transform not only my way of studying but also my way of experiencing music.

Every technical or musical problem is resolved first at the mental level. From that moment, this thought revolutionized my way of conceiving of the world of sound. At that time, I experienced an amazing revelation: I closed my eyes and saw myself... playing tense! Of course, the fact that everybody was telling me that I was too stiff when I played had made my mind register it as a total and absolute truth. It was as if my system of beliefs had taken the judgments of those around me and made them reality for me. I tried to improve this reality with external solutions like lowering my shoulders when I played or studying technical challenges like vibrato a thousand different ways. But these solutions weren’t enough, because they were only temporary and they limited my potential instead of developing it. The realization that I saw myself as a tense violin player led me to the decision that I had to change my mental image of who I was when I played my musical instrument. It was clear that the