• I) Find a place where you can be completely alone, and spend some time reading a book. Let yourself be open to the reading and the experience of being alone. Let your internal dialogue quiet and stop, Breathe deeply and slowly. Let the breathing relax your body and calm your mind.
  
  What is it like to sit and read? How do you feel? How does the light level of the room affect you? What is touching your body? How does the contact affect you? What other factors are you aware of? What about the solitude? How does it feel to be alone?
  
  
• II) Find a place where you are alone with one other person. It doesn't matter whether you know them, as long as the two of you are the only people or animals that you're aware of. Continue to read, and again let your head clear and your body relax. What is different between where you are now and where you were for part I? How many of the factors that you noticed before are different? How do these differences affect you? Does the presence of the other person affect your feelings and awareness? Are there sensory effects (can you hear, smell, feel, taste, see them?) Are you close enough to feel warmth from their body? Are there ways you seem to be affected by them that don't stem from sensory input?
• III) Get together with one other person, someone you know. Choose a book and spend some time reading to each other. Remember to let your minds clear and bodies relax. Afterwards, talk about what it was like to do this together. How was the active interaction different from being in the same space without interacting? What function did the book have in your relationship? Was it different to listen than to read? Was there anything you did, as listener, to communicate to the reader?
  
  The activity aside, how did the quality of being together differ from the quality of being alone?
  

      Through playing music, I've found that the presence of one other person causes a fundamental change in my environment. What I'm doing, the music I'm playing, undergoes a similar change, since what I'm doing is always affected by my state of being, and who I am is always conditioned by my immediate environment. There is no way my surroundings can change without changing me, and vice versa.

      On an outward level, this means a change in my sensory awareness: the air moves, I smell an odor, the light level changes, footsteps make the floor shake. On a less obvious, sub-conscious level, I am processing more subtle sensory clues. Further down, on an unconscious level, It becomes difficult to determine the boundary between myself and the world.

      I once dreamed that I was in a warm sea channel that was separated from the open sea by a line in the water. There was no restriction of passage between these spaces the water mixed freely throughout, and creatures from the open sea swam freely into what I knew was my channel. The only boundary between my personal water and the collective, open water was the one tenuous line.( 1)

      We are used to the thought of our bodies and minds being exclusively our own, impenetrable. We derive a great deal of security from the knowledge that our privacy is complete - nobody can enter our bodies or minds. On a sensory level, in every way that we can see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, this is true. Our senses are clustered on that one tenuous line - perhaps they are that line itself but the water, the essence of being is undifferentiated.

      In my work as a massage therapist, I have often experienced this flow, this level of existence on which the boundaries between myself and the client are indistinct. Somehow, I am aware of where tension is being carried in their body. I experience the same symptoms they are experiencing. My heartbeat or breathing will align with theirs. The client and I slip into a sort of trance, and by being aware of what is going on in my own body, I can be aware of and alter the state of my client's. It is as if my body has become a metaphor or mirror for theirs.

      This is a highly specialized state of awareness and it would be impractical and exhausting to attempt to maintain it at all times, but learning to perceive on that level has been a valuable addition to my bag of musical skills. It has taught me that people and places around me help to define who I am from moment to moment. As an improvisatory player, I can draw on this perception to make music that is appropriate to the situation in which I find myself.

      In any activities that involve other people, we use psychic energy to achieve the interaction necessary for working together. This energy can take many forms, depending on its intensity, from simple awareness to concentrated attention, to the extreme state we call being in love, which brings into play mythological elements from deep within the collective unconscious. The amount of energy we have available for our conscious use is limited, and so it is important to make the most efficient use of it in order to maximize our musical potential. (2)

      During my initial training in bodywork, I invented a system of diagrams that demonstrate the way this energy moves between people. I quickly discovered that they were useful in describing and solving particular problems inherent to musical ensembles.

      In the diagrams, each person is represented by a black dot surrounded by concentric lines, representing levels of psychic energy, or awareness..

      In Figure 1, we see the person who is by himself. In terms of this energy, he is self-centered. When a second person enters the room (fig. 2) , the outermost levels of awareness are brought into play. The two people now share a level of awareness with each other. When they actually turn to each other and start to interact, they put conscious attention on each other, adding deeper levels of energy(Fig. 3) . In this interaction, they share several levels of energy, so each person feels more energetic while interacting than when alone.

      When two people are interacting in this way, the energy transfer is fairly straightforward. Each has an equal role and a single point of focus. When a third person joins them, we get an interesting problem. (Fig. 4)

     
This diagram represents an ideal state - one in which all three are giving each other equal attention. The diagram makes it clear why this almost never happens in real life. Since each person has two people to interact with, and a finite amount of energy to use, he has only half as much attention to give to each person. A more realistic diagram would show a series of shifts between several states (Fig. 5) , in which either one person is the focus of everyone's attention, or two people are interacting, with the third passively watching or following.

• Get together with two friends. Prepare and eat a meal together. Include menu planning, shopping, cooking, and eating as group activities
• Afterwards, discuss the experience. Was there a leader, or did all three participate equally at all times? How did the focus of conversation move?
  

      Playing in a musical ensemble, in this case a trio, presents a communication problem. It is difficult for all three musicians to actively communicate at the same time. While this is often solved by having one person lead the group, it is best to cultivate a situation where all three are actively participating and providing the driving force for the music. The music is an entity produced by the mixing of three disparate elements, and the trio should act and sound like a single entity, without sacrificing the individuality of any of the players.

      The exercise "group clapping II" in the last chapter presents a way of approaching this democratic ideal. It demonstrates the loophole that allows music to work in groups.

      In that exercise you removed your attention from the individual members of the group and put it on the sound itself. You made the clapping into a separate being, one that expressed your relationship to all the others present. Instead of focusing on individuals, you created an entity that was the sum total of those individuals and related directly to it. In this way, everyone in the group had a one-on-one relationship with the music (Fig. 6).

      I have seen this concept used with great success in situations where a large number of people were singing and dancing together. The leader of the group encouraged us to listen to the sound at the center of the circle, where it blended together and expressed the essence of our being together. The effect was to pull the music together and give it coherence in a situation where many of us did not know each other or the music.

      This approach works with any size group, although it is my experience that organized ensembles actually break down into smaller units that function as individuals in the larger pattern.

      I want to call particular attention to four relationships, four different points of interaction that together make music the challenging and complex occupation that it is.

      The first and most basic of these relationships is that of the musician to his environment. Music is an activity which puts special emphasis on the circumstances, both social and physical, in ,which it's played. We bounce sounds off walls, and the resulting reverberations change the sound and our perspective on it. Our social background determines. To a large extent what and how we play. The complexity of our interaction with the sound and space around us is staggering.

      The possible environmental changes that can affect a musical performance range from subtleties that functionally do not exist outside of theoretical psychology, to an extreme as large as the ceiling of the auditorium collapsing on those inside. Most of these changes are so subtle, so far beneath the threshold of your consciousness that you could play music all your life and never be aware of them. But, to be open to these subtle changes and variables paves the way for an awareness of and openness to larger changes that can turn a rote performance to a living statement that speaks directly to everyone present.

      The second relationship is that between the musician and the music he is playing. There needs to be active participation in the music. Put reflexively, in order for me to play a piece of music, I need to play it. For a successful musical performance, however, it is not enough to relate-only to the notes, the phrasing, the technical corpus of the music. I need to have a connection to something beyond the page, something that is not contained in the musical score. I need to take what the composer has given me, and bring something of my own experience of the music to the performance. There is a creative task in music no matter how strictly the composer has defined the music. When I perform a piece of music, I am bringing to it my own way of hearing, my own preconceptions, my own emotions. I have my own individual touch on the instrument. My muscular response and sense of rhythm are different from any other musical performer. By virtue of being an individual, my Performance of that piece will be essentially different from anyone else's. The music includes a statement of my state of being - a reflection of the state of my mind, body, and spirit at the time of the performance.

      The third relationship is that between the musician and other musicians. Playing music in a group is essentially different from playing music alone, and takes special skills, a special way of listening. Different groups and different configurations of instruments all require different ways of approaching the interaction that goes on between them. Every musician in the ensemble needs to be able to play in a way that expresses his individuality, while still reflecting a cooperation and shared involvement with the music.

      The fourth and final relationship is that of the musician to his audience. Whether playing solo or in a group, the audience is always a large part of' why you are playing music. An audience can intimidate a performer to the point of completely derailing his performance if he is not able to make a meaningful connection with that often anonymous body of faces. Audience-performer relationships are for some the whole reason for performing, and for others a compelling reason not to perform. Who you are playing for and why is one of the most important issues a musician will address.

      The next four chapters will take up the critical relationships in detail.

      1. This dream illustrates in a very elegant way Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, represented by the open sea. The channel that is mine is my own personal unconscious. For further reading on Jung's psychology, see the bibliography.

      Our senses and our cultural upbringing have trained us to focus on this line exclusively, to the point where it appears uncrossable. Others - mystics, seers, philosophers, tell us that we are all one, that the separation we sense is an illusion created by the ego. What my dream tells me is that my separation from the cosmos is real - there is a boundary - but that the substance of being flows freely in both directions across that boundary.

      2. See Jung's discussion of psychic energy in "The structure and dynamics of the psyche."