Ryan Larson - Flow in the Context of Music

Though I have not spent prolonged periods of time on the Appalachian Trail (yet), I believe that at times I have experienced some form of flow. Mostly, this comes in the form of music. One day, for instance, I was playing piano in the Pope Chapel. This must have been three or four months ago. Guitar is my main instrument, and I had taught myself the basics of the keyboard, but piano was still very new to me. My relative inexperience makes sense– as the book says, flow often happens when one is in unexplored territory. After messing around for a while, mostly in C major (all the white keys, so it isn’t too hard to identify chords), I tried playing only black keys instead. Interestingly, I found that the feel of it was completely different. This is because there are fewer black keys than white keys in an octave– the black keys are a pentatonic scale. It’s what’s used in blues and so on. This effectively means that no matter what notes you’re playing, it’s going to sound pretty good as long as your rhythm is consistent. I started fooling around, playing chords (I had no idea what the chords were) on the bass end and fingering little melodies on the treble. The nice thing about piano is that, like guitar, it can be played either like a melodic or a rhythm instrument. The piano thundered. For one of the first times, I found that I wasn’t playing the music– I was only listening to what my fingers were doing on their own. Normally, a performer is too focused on hitting the right notes to actually enjoy what he or her is playing. In that time, however, I was an audience to myself. Time passed quickly. A while later (minutes? Hours? I had no idea) my fingers began to hurt, and I reluctantly stopped playing. If someone else had been listening while all that had been going on, I have no idea how the music would have sounded. I just know that to me, I had unlocked a new world.

This, I suspect, is similar in nature to the concept of flow described in American Camino. In subsequent times that I’ve come back to the piano, it hasn’t been quite the same. That feeling, I suppose, is fleeting and hard to conjure. The reason that I felt that particular way at that particular time may be because it was something completely new to me. Discovery is a key part of flow. I play guitar every day, and often I’ll play familiar progressions without really thinking about it– but that isn’t flow. That’s just my muscle memory guiding the music along the well-trodden paths: unconscious cruise control. Flow, I think, is inextricably tied to discovery. Maybe that’s why it’s often seen on the Appalachian Trail– as a hiker, you’re always moving on to new locations, new areas, new territories. You’ll never pass the same way twice save by backtracking. It’s the prime location for discovery. And with discovery, there is often an element of uncertainty. You must throw yourself to the winds in order to reach someplace new. That element was present at the piano– one wrong note or ruined rhythm could have discordantly thrown me out of my reverie. From a music theory perspective, I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn’t have described what chord I was playing, or why I played them in the order that I did. The keyboard was more of a visual apparatus than a theoretical one– I thought not of notes but of shapes. It’s hard to explain. Perhaps this was another reason that I encountered flow– I discovered a whole new way of looking at things. Normally, when you write a chord progression you’ll pay attention to the chords themselves (start at the 1, go to the 4, maybe the major 3 if you’re feeling bold, finally go to the 5 and resolve back to the 1). On the guitar, this makes sense. No matter where you are on the fretboard, the relative positions of each chord to its relative constituents remains the same. This was how I was used to looking at things. On the piano, however, it was completely different. My knowledge of keys and relative chords was useless because I didn’t know how to identify what chords I was playing. I had to rely on a new set of rules– visual ones. Find a piano sometime and try it– play only the black keys. No matter what notes you play, it’ll be a decent-sounding chord. Make new shapes if you want. It’s pretty fun.

Point being, reevaluation of your methods is a key part of the reinvention of yourself. Nearly every hero’s journey involves some sort of change in the hero. To use a contemporary example, Luke Skywalker from Star Wars must use the Force rather than his own senses in order to defeat the Death Star at the end of the movie. This is the internal journey– the hero goes from ignorance to knowledge. Take the story of the Future Buddha and Sticky-hair, as described in The Hero of a Thousand Faces: “...Future Buddha, no longer protected by the five weapons of his momentary name and physical character, resorted to the invisible, unnamed sixth: the divine thunderbolt of the knowledge of the transcendent principle, which is beyond the phenomenal realm of names and forms. Therewith the situation changed. He was no longer caught, but released; for that which he remembered himself to be is ever free” (page 73). Only after he has no more worldly weapons can the Buddha overcome his obstacle. In the same way, I could not discover a new way of playing the piano until I switched to a style that was unknown to me. I had no crutch to lean upon, so I was forced to evolve.

This blog post has been a little scattered, but the basic points are thus: flow is an uncontrollable state in which we are intensely connected to our activity, flow is achieved in parallel with discovery, and in order to cover new ground we must first overcome our preexisting crutches and weaknesses. Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.