Too Slow for Comfort
I picked up the violin again after a very long break. The hardest thing was taking it out of its box. The second hardest was playing an open string. Very. Slowly.
My teacher, Jean Dane, swears by the 60-second bow. It’s part of the warm-up routine she makes all her students do. Over the years I have come to recognize its genius. First, I saw how playing unnaturally, uncomfortably, unmusically slowly improves fine muscle control. It develops familiarity with parts of the bow I used to avoid because they felt so awkward and sounded so crap.
But over time I’ve come to see that the exercise unfolds its magic not so much in my hand as inside my mind. The more I surrender to the discomfort of slowness, the more space seems to open up on my bow. My resources expand. And with it my freedom.
One minute is a long time to pull a 30-inch bow across a string. It has to be perfectly even, too, so that 30 seconds in I hit the exact midpoint. The five inches nearest the heel are the hardest to keep smooth and slow: so much weight rests on the pinkie; shoulder and elbow are at an awkward angle. Past the midpoint there is a stretch that feels so easeful that I actually have to imagine accelerating the motion just to keep pace with the metronome. There are also huge variations from one string to the next because the thickness and texture affect the friction on the bow.
In 2015 the Japanese Fluxus artist Takehisa Kosugi had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum. His performances are equal parts comedy stunts and Zen koans. One “piece” consisted of him crumpling a sheet of paper around a microphone. For the next five minutes, the audience listened to the amplified pops and crackles of the paper as it tried to spring back into shape. In another, he rolled around on the floor wrapped in some sort of cocoon, rattling boxes of dry soup mix.
Because this was an audience of New Yorkers, and the setting was a museum of modern art, everyone had a mighty good time. So when Kosugi picked up a violin and played an unbroken note on a single bow for 120 seconds, most people laughed and applauded. As a slow-bow practitioner, I was impressed. A 2-minute bow seemed outright virtuosic.
It also seems more interesting than some of the more spectacular experiments in musical slowness that have made headlines. You might have heard about John Cage’s piece for organ, “As Slow As Possible,” which has filled a church in Halberstadt, Germany, since September 5, 2001 and is slated to last for 639 years.
Weights hung from the organ pedals keep the notes in place. Chord changes are years apart. The New York Times reported on the most recent one in September. Depending on how you see it, the piece speaks to patience, optimism or the hubris of the composer.
There’s also a cottage industry in slowing down famous pieces of music with the help of technology. You can hear a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth stretched by a factor of 21 so that the entire symphony takes about 24 hours to take in. It’s worth dipping into, to see how extreme dilation alters the emotional content of such an iconic piece of music.
To me it’s like relentless revelation. Wall-to-wall bombast. Death by elation.
And it’s not just Beethoven. Three million people found time to listen to Justin Bieber’s “U Smile”played 800 times slower on YouTube. One commentator likens it to falling 50 stories in slow motion from a futuristic apartment complex.
But these expeditions into extreme slowness are ultimately easy trips, because their creators have outsourced them to machines. Decelerating the body – your own body – has a completely different effect on the mind.
In his brilliant philosophical novel “Slowness” Milan Kundera explains what happens when the task of going fast is relegated to technology.
Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.
To understand the difference, try walking meditation. The classic Buddhist practice involves staking out a short straight line between two points, fixing your gaze on one end and walking very, very slowly towards it. Heel makes contact with floor. Middle of the foot makes contact. Ball and toes push off. Repeat. When you reach your end point, turn around smoothly and do it all over.
I hated walking meditation when I first tried it. It triggered memories of other places where people shuffle slowly, head bowed: a mental institution where I once visited a friend after her suicide attempt. The retirement home where my Dad has been confined in recent years.
But as with the slow bows, I’ve come to appreciate walking meditation. When the space in between one step and the next expands this much, the range of possibilities do, too. When the next step no longer seems inevitable but fraught with tiny muscular decisions, other certainties also come unstuck.
In this tiny (but time-consuming) playlist, the notes are played by musicians, not machines. That means that the space in between the notes is also held by human possibility – including, possibly, doubt and boredom. I hear these pieces as expressions of a kind of virtuosity of temperament that we would all do well to cultivate. Patience. Equanimity. And sustained wonder.