Why does the music awaken irritation and aversion? It has to do with how you use your attention.
During a concert, my head was, as it can be in meditation, full of thoughts demanding attention. I watched the musicians' hand movements, saw the back of the head of the person in front of me partly covering the stage, heard someone coughing. While the music filled the room with rhythms and warm tones.
A meeting between musical traditions
The concert was with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and saxophonist Marius Neset. Andsnes is trained as a classical solo pianist, and Neset plays jazz on saxophone and clarinet. Together they have released the album Who We Are, where they explore the meeting between each other and the two different musical traditions of classical music and jazz.
(you can listen to the first track on Who We Are: Beginning here: Spotify)
This concert gave me associations with the meditative. It takes a little time from when the music starts until I can feel that I come into contact with the sounding board within myself, where I am able to take part in the music's harmony and occasional disharmony. What is happening?
The concert resonated with experiences from meditation, especially around the use of attention.
Unpredictable
During the concert, I could at times notice that it was especially the rhythmic element I latched on to. Rhythm is a good point of support. And then I became preoccupied with the contrast between the piano's stringent and clear tones set against the saxophone's more dragging sounds. It was as if I could feel the pianist's fingers hitting the right keys with adapted force. While the saxophonist sent out sounds a little more across and around, usually rhythmically, but at the same time more freely and playfully. In a way, the piano represents something safer and firmer, while the saxophone's sometimes howling and more outburst-like sounds become more unpredictable and at times created aversion and unease in me.
The music pulls apart
While the musicians take turns improvising and leading, something full of contrasts unfolds - something is caught in attention that is familiar and easier to contain, such as a clear rhythm, and then something comes that is not expected or that I do not think fits in and awakens the feeling "ugh, do I want this?" or "this was very disharmonious and noisy". I could feel that it was difficult to follow the music. My inner critic says "now it became unrhythmic here - disturbing", "they are not in tune with each other, the music pulls apart and does not hang together". It feels as if I fall completely out of it, and I notice that I become restless.
It is often when I sense some unease during the concert that it can feel "tiring" to sit, the seat suddenly feels hard, and I struggle to get anything out of what is unfolding.
Wider attention
As in meditation, I remained sitting and let these thoughts, which distanced me from the music that was alive right in front of me, pass. Perhaps this is where the use of attention comes in? I have a kind of choice between remaining with the restlessness and the critical thoughts, and seeing whether there is something else moving that does not take up as much space, but is nevertheless also present. Are there other moods or feelings moving at the edge? What is this discomfort really, or what does it touch?
During the concert, after a while I seemed able to have a somewhat curious and more open attention. It was as if I "lost" myself a little, in the sense that my inner critic was no longer as insistently active and the music again became more central. Attention became in a way wider and more inclusive. As if the jazz, the improvisation and the stylistic piano nevertheless sounded together in an inexplicable way. And it was possible to take it in and sense that there was something here - something different, and yet a kind of harmony amid the unrhythmic and divergent.
Increased tolerance from meditation
Letting myself into the living music became in a way a parallel to meditation, in the sense of finding a way of being present where attention can move from a narrow focus to containing something more - in this case, tolerating something that on one level was unwanted. In that way, one might say that changed attention helped increase tolerance for what was moving in me. Something let go, and eventually it became possible to value what is and also experience it in another way than the first impulse.
So who are we? We see the world through our own sets of glasses. My glasses may be ones that distort, narrow and avoid. But both in meditation and in life otherwise, I also have the possibility of "polishing" the glasses, making them clearer now and then so that I see more widely and contain more.
Deeper experiences
This is precisely what I think Andsnes and Neset were exploring and experimenting with. I am glad I was allowed to join their musical journey, and I take the experience back to my next meditation, hoping I am better equipped when something appears in spontaneous activity that one side of me does not want or want to have there. The challenge is to see whether it is possible to use attention so that the uncomfortable does not lead me astray, but resonates in a way I am able to contain instead of merely trying to push away. Our mind has several levels. Beneath unease, emptiness and restlessness, other experiences vibrate.
Petter Halvorsen