The Art in Practice I How to Find Devotion in Repetition

I started doing yoga again after a long break. On Gaia, a subscription website, I found a series of lessons by Kevin Courtney, who years ago taught at a Tribeca studio I used to frequent. His specialty was a two-hour-plus Sunday evening class combining chi gong, Vinyasa yoga and guided meditation that had me virtually floating out of the room.

In one of the online classes Kevin talks about a Hindu concept called Abhyasa, which he says translates as both practice and devotion. We all know practice: the deliberate application of effort on an isolated task, over and over, in order to deepen skill. Abhyasa, if I understand the term correctly, invites us to bring a quality of devotion to that practice. 

The term helped me verbalize something I have experienced during sustained periods of practicing the violin and now encounter in my meditation practice. It’s this paradox: that while I might embark on a particular exercise with a goal in mind, the exercise only works when I relinquish the impatience to get to the other side. When I devote myself not to the goal, but to the practice.

I thought of this as I listened to a new CD of the pianist Simone Dinnerstein playing music by Philip Glass and Franz Schubert. The pieces by Glass are etudes.

It turns out that etudes (French for studies) are perfect examples of Abhyasa. In the practice room, musicians work with exercises (like scales) and on repertoire, learning the pieces they will play in performance. And then there is the in-between genre of etudes, where practice becomes art. 

Etudes usually isolate a particular technical difficulty and find beauty in it. Composers who write them are bit like TV chefs in a game show that forces them to whip up a gourmet meal with just four ingredients – one of them something like durian.

Frederic Chopin elevated etudes to virtuosic heights with pieces that proceed only in thirds, say, or use only the black keys of the piano. There are brilliant piano studies for the left hand only by composers including Johannes Brahms and Bela Bartok.

Glass is an interesting case because his “proper” music – not written for study – works with so much repetition that it inherently sounds like practice. I used to think that all that repetition in his music draws on the grinding patterns of our mechanized age. But Glass is deeply steeped in Daoism and a devoted practitioner of Chi Gong and yoga. 

I think some of his best work is found in his etudes, where that quality of Abhaya unfolds in a swirl of simple musical cells. They require great focus on the part of the performer, but they can also become meditation guides to a listener willing to surrender that impatience to get to the other side. The reward is often a sudden release, tucked in halfway into a piece, where the musical pattern cracks open allowing for a rush of completely fresh energy.

If you have a quiet 15 minutes this weekend, surrender to this playlist of etudes by Anton Reicha (a childhood friend of Beethoven’s who wrote intricate musical puzzles) and Glass. And if you find yourself called to perform a repetitive task, like chopping vegetables, see what happens if you approach it with a bit of Abhyasa.

As always, let me know how Inward Sound resonates with you by hitting reply to this email. And please forward it to a friend who might like it.

Corinna