Eisenhower on Drums
Improvisation and composition in Quadrant 2, for the recalibration of creative ways, through the challenge of basic habits, related to brain hemispheres.
Quadrant 2 of The Eisenhower Matrix - Important but not urgent
The Eisenhower Matrix is a reminder of the great importance of discerning between things important and things urgent. I almost always find myself operating in either Quadrant 1 or 3 (on productive days) and Quadrant 4 (on unfocused days). Quadrant 2, however, is where I want to be. This is where the most important, non-urgent, work lies; the work of growing as a human being and an artist, of realising creative visions and making plans for the future. This project is a way of forcing myself back into the Q2 space as often as possible.
Some of the Q2 points of my creative life
Learning how to work in the artistic field in a healthy and sustainable way.
Developing and deepening skills as a composer and performer.
Finding ways to work with what I find difficult, gently bringing it into a Q2 space.
Accepting and challenging fear, seizing opportunities and taking chances.
Making career plans and acting upon them.
Opening up to the outer world and other people.
Creating balance between ego and instinct.
Recalibration of creative ways
In terms of creativity, I find that I have some serious Q2 work to be done. In my case, the work I particularly need to do is one of loosening my grip of music and of myself, both as a composer and performer. I have, in my work of cultivating and consolidating a personal musical approach, unknowingly harmed myself and the music through over-controlling. I worked for thousands of hours on an album that now to me sounds impressive, yet also redundant and pompous in some ways, not truly conveying the depth I worked so hard for it to convey. I find that the music I often listen to myself, is often less polished, less controlled, that it is the freedom of expression that can be heard in the music that I find truly engaging. Therefore, the EoD project aims, at an internal level, to open myself up to working with more material, keeping my head above the water of anal perfectionism, and seeing that the process and joy of creating is of equal importance as the end result.
Improvisation and composition
The external aim of EoD is the composition of a large body of new work, made possible through a daily improvising practise using inverted drumkit and voice, followed immediately by a spontaneous and judgement-free composition session.
Challenging basic habits
I aim at loosening my over-controlling attitudes through the continued practise of a few basic exercises, designed to take me out of deeply rooted habitual ways of operating. The basic method is a ritual of a 20 minute improvised session for inverted drum kit and voice, immediately followed by a brief and spontaneous composition session. The whole thing is recorded and improvisation and composition listened to at a later time when the content is forgotten.
Brain hemispheres
Whether or not the popularly held belief in right/left brain is valid, there is agreement that the right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere and vice versa, and that the two hemispheres are very different in their processing of sensory information. In EoD I am making my own experiments and challenging my brain halves, through the intentional shift away from dominant hand and foot action.
Left side
I’m trying to gently hack my system by changing my approach to this basic building block; instinctual might be the word for it. By improvising using the left hand drum kit together with my voice, I want to create a Q2 space in which the left side is given a new and important role. Through the continued exploration of this field, I hope to be able to gradually make a change going "up the structure", allowing for changes also in the control-demanding parts of finishing works.
For some reason, this is an area I have been drawn to since the beginning of my musical education. I see a real significance, and even beauty, in giving the responsibility of the downbeat and power of the kick drum to the weaker side of the body. I am not sure what my obscure, somewhat neglected left side will say or do when I start to give it attention.
Large body of work
At the heart of the project is a wish to renounce the idea of perfection, and work with much larger body of material than I have done before, approaching it in an open and curious way, similar to the way the drums and voice are approached. Ideally, I would love my creative work to be like tending a large garden with a variety of plants and seedlings. In a place like that I would never think of forcing a flower to bloom.
Drums and voice
Apart from the drums and voice being fundamental instruments, I find that the bodily shift of playing the inverted drums while using the voice, is an effective way of short circuiting superego and technical focus. Therefore, I have chosen them as the main tools for EoD. And as mentioned, in an early vision of myself as a musician, I was playing the drums and singing. It seemed, and still does, completely ideal to me, and I am happy to be moving in that direction.
Mirrored writing
Another way of shaking unconscious patterns is through the practise of mirrored writing. I will be developing the ability to write with my left hand, mirrored.
I will investigate my inner state as I write, trying to get a grasp of the difference in attitude, kinaesthetic experience and thought activity, caused by the awkwardness and lack of experience, and the activation of new brain regions.
Comme il faut - habit / inhibition / compensation
Since my teens, I have been frustrated with things presented as “just the way it’s done”. One early observation is about the tendency to use all sorts of instruments (forks, pencils, guitars etc.) in one way; either the one that seems easier or most efficient, or the way a teacher appoints as the right and only way. After a skill has been learned, it is very rarely revisited, unlearned or even recognized as habitual. Through nine years of practising the Alexander Technique, I have become aware of the degree which the use of our own primary instruments, the musculoskeletal system, eyes and voice is unconscious, often lacking efficiency and sustainability. Thousands of kinaesthetic processes are involved in any simple action, and we are for the most part completely oblivious about this deeper reality. By becoming aware, on the experiential level, about underlying processes while taking a neutral stance, there is a great potential for insight and grounding in physical reality.
Similarly, through my entire musical education, I have been observing my own constant return to well known ways of doing things, basic patterns of movement, physical as well as mental. Although I’ve been able to observe this, I have been too inhibited to do much about it. This has marked my creativity to an extent where I have for long years given up entirely on the idea of improvising, questioning the talk of free playing, because I felt no such freedom. I did not have the courage or headroom to break these patterns, and so, I turned to a perfectionistic carving out my music in stone, as a means of releasing my urge for creativity and self expression.
In this mode of working, I become somewhat stiff, with a limited ability to explore the outer edges of the material. It is also painfully slow, with my inner censor present at all times, evaluating any incoming seed of an idea before it can sprout. During these years, instead of opening up to new ideas, I was working on just a handful of compositions, thereby neglecting the influx of water to the well of future ideas.
EoD is about getting this flow back into a healthy state.
Noting
This important, last part of EoD is about listening to/watching the improvisations and sketches while taking notes. I’ve considered different names for this process and settled for a word borrowed from insight meditation. You note as you sit and observe the physical body as subtly as possible. You try to be accurate and non-judgmental. It didn’t seem quite right to use a word like evaluation, which brings to mind an assessment of good/bad. It is of course not possible to bypass the differentiation between what is liked/disliked, and objectivity is not a goal either. Instead, I want to keep a noting mindset, because I believe it enhances the possibility of entering a Q2 state to just note, rather than assess.
Following the same logic, noting is not meant to be purposeful, as in making lists of things to do differently, or deciding on a routine for the the next session. It is my experience that the notes that I’m already giving to myself unconsciously, while listening or watching the sessions are making their way to the evaluation centers in my brain rather effortlessly. And it is my job as the noter to modify this process, being gentle with myself, withstanding even the downright awful and seeing it with curious eyes.
Expected outcome
What I hope to achieve through the EoD practise is a subtle but real change of my creative work habits. I want to break the vicious circles of perfectionistic tunnelvision, and replace it with a steady and less judgmental (daily) practise. On the practical level, I hope that the project will be a step towards a bigger creative output, both in music and other fields.
In general, the project is about energy, about (re)connecting with what I experience as a kind of universal creative force.
Through my work here, I hope to bring about a stronger balance between control and surrender in my life and work.
And I would like it to be a lot of fun!
