Every once in a while, I am very grateful to come across something so Spirit provoking. Natalie Hodges is a violinist and writes about improvisation in music.
It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so reminded that we know ourselves only incompletely and the future not at all; that inside us dwell parts so unexplored as to be capable of surprising the conscious totality — parts drawing on some subterranean river of lore to make instantaneous decisions we never could have planned and did not anticipate.
Lurking in it all is the haunting intimation of the illusion of choice, gnawing at the fundament of the self: Who exactly is doing the deciding that surprises the decided-for?
And yet out of such confusion, such delight. We call these delightful and disorienting deviations from the script improvisation. Nowhere are they more impressive, or more illustrative of the broader paradoxes of the self, than in music.
That is what violinist Natalie Hodges explores in one of the most enchanting parts of Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (public library) — her altogether fascinating inquiry into the poetic science of sound and feeling.
Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness. Inside the brain’s secret portal to remembering the future by Maria Popova, themarginalian.org, July 6, 2022
In improvisation, the generation of material is spontaneous, but it’s never random. This in itself constitutes a paradox: If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing — on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it — except chance? In other words, how can the spontaneous be anything but random; how can music made in a jolt of instinct, on a bolt out of the now, be endowed with a form that makes sense in time, as though it had been written and rewritten and practiced and memorized beforehand? And how, in making that first, most instinctive, most desperate decision, do we choose — if it really can be called “choosing,” if we really choose at all?
Natalie Hodges
Maria Popova says improvisation is nowhere more impressive than in music. And Natalie Hodges asks how improvisation can be anything but chance.
“If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing — on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it — except chance?”
As a Quaker, when I read this, I wondered if the idea improvisation could be a way to express how we listen for the Spirit.
There are similarities between improvisation and Spiritual guidance. “It is both thrilling and terrifying to be so reminded that we know ourselves only incompletely and the future not at all; that inside us dwell parts so unexplored as to be capable of surprising the conscious totality — parts drawing on some subterranean river of lore to make instantaneous decisions we never could have planned and did not anticipate.”
But there is a fundamental distinction between Spiritual guidance and improvisation. Improvisation might be a matter of chance. Whereas guidance from the Spirit is not.
Quakers and Religious Socialism 