During my 21 years as a dance accompanist in two major universities and multiple companies, I was in a situation where I had to interpret choreography as music in a way that the instructor deemed to be supportive and accurate. One of the most interesting things about being a musician in that context is that you spend all day generating music from qualitative descriptions and, often, non-musical terminology. As accompanists, we might be asked to play “something expansive” or “something menacing,” and the teacher might provide the dance student with imagery instead of technical corrections to bring the quality of their movement closer to the desired result. During one class in particular, a teacher I was accompanying for went so far as to explain to the class why certain imagery was being used, “how you think about what you do changes what you do.” This simple statement is the key to uncovering a highly creative method of artistic development.
Some Examples of Focus-Led Influence
A simple example of this is readily available in musical practice. The imagery, story, or belief system that you use as the starting point for your composition will dictate the choices you make to support that story; this is a basic tenet of narrative composition. By way of another example, consider how you might work on a task that you care deeply about vs. one that you consider of little value or worthless. In this example, your concept of how valuable your work is might affect things like your attention to detail, the quality of materials or tools you use, and even how much time you spend making sure things are done properly. How you think about this task could even affect what you think constitutes it being done properly. A more complex framework might be as follows. Consider a widget-making factory whose management believes that industry should contain markers of sustainability to justify itself. This widget factory would have renewable energy built into the very fabric of its operating cost structure as opposed to a factory operating without that belief that might see sustainability as an extra consideration to be incorporated only after profit starts rolling in.
I used one example of a mindset-leading exercise in an ensemble class I taught. We would get about 30 minutes into the repertoire, stop, and then take a moment to imagine that we are allocating our effort to playing 30% and listening 70%. We would take just a moment to recognize that idea and then resume playing. The result was often a noticeable increase in intonation accuracy and a noticeable improvement in overall ensemble balance.
Automated Responses
The above examples show the basic cause-and-effect structure of mindset directing focus and, eventually, action. As we go through life, it is common for mindset to be something we participate in passively. We inherit our approach to what we are doing from a set of values that are often time given to us from outside education or experiences. Many of life’s experiences and circumstances are not chosen or not chosen consciously, and so they shape our opinions over time in ways we may not be aware of. We model behavior, observe, believe what we are taught by people we respect, and continue to do and value things we receive praise for. All of this builds up to create a set of automated responses we choose from an accordant menu of socially conditioned values. The power of noticing this is that it opens the door to the inverse dynamic, that of non-automated responses. Using the mind to guide the mind allows the potential for creating a wider range of experiences, and continued use of these techniques reinforces the ability to choose conscious action over reflexive reaction. What follows is a simple example of one such exercise and its implications.
Introducing The Exercise
This exercise, which I call “Horizonal Procession,” is extremely easy at its root. No special material is needed unless you require help to move forward in space, in which case you can proceed with the exercise once all of those accommodations are in place. When I developed the exercise, I did it while walking. I will proceed using bipedal locomotion as my framework, but feel free to adapt it to any way you are able to process forward in space, including enlisting the aid of an attendant or helper.
These are the basic physical steps to perform the exercise:
Before you begin, please remember that you are not to put yourself in a dangerous situation or attempt this on any terrain that requires a high degree of attention to navigate safely. If you have any doubt that you can navigate your path with 100% safety at any point, you should break the exercise and restart when you are on terrain that you can safely take your attention off of. Proceed slowly if needed, using slow steps to alert you if any object is in your way that you might not notice while performing the exercise. During this exercise, you will be taking your attention off of your method of locomotion, so if you don’t feel safe doing that, do not engage in the exercise.
1- The first step is to begin walking or moving forward, preferably in an outdoor space.
2—The second step is to focus on the furthest point on the horizon or other distant point at eye level while your head is upright and forward-facing.
3—The third step is to not look down at your feet or break your gaze on the horizon.
4- expand your awareness of your field of vision to include as much of your periphery as possible.
This is intended to work by creating a relatively simple physical task and practicing maintaining awareness in a moderately challenging state.
Walking, we often look down at the path in front of us. Even if we do not walk with a constant downcast gaze, most people frequently glance at the path in front of them to help them navigate irregularities, regardless of whether or not the path requires it. For this exercise, we will avoid even a glance down at the path in front of us. If you are walking upright with your feet, you can use a slightly slower, more deliberate heel placement to see if there is an irregularity in the path that might cause you to trip. Moving more slowly also reduces the risk of tripping.
Implications of the Exercise
As you become accustomed to the exercise, you may notice that your mind is more aware of your path than you might think. The ground beneath you comes into your field of vision well before you reach it, and your mind has already begun processing the adjustments you may need to make. This is the first implication of the exercise: trust your adaptive processes to a less immediately conscious mode of processing. To put it more allegorically, trust that your mind is taking in your environment and that it will make the necessary adjustments for you to proceed safely. Once you can maintain this state for a little while, you might feel much lighter as your mind is freed from analyzing a small area in front of you and making decisions that are relevant only for a moment and begins taking in a large amount of information that is relevant over a much more extended period. If you break your gaze to look down to avoid a hazard or just out of habit, that is fine; resume the exercise as soon as that need to attend to your steps has passed. When starting, an interval of one minute without breaking the exercise is good. A sidewalk or well-maintained forest trail is great for this exercise due to the lack of risk of falling. Cemetery trails are also great for this.
This first outcome dovetails nicely into the second. With our conscious mind freed from negotiating individual steps, we can allocate more energy to taking in a more expansive conception of our surroundings. As we consciously maintain our gaze on the horizon simultaneously, we are attempting to expand our awareness, not just on a distant point on the horizon but on a vast peripheral spectrum that includes the center directly in front of us. Usually, when I do this, it feels like “opening” my visual field to the sides from the center, tracing a path like a fan held closed in front of my eyes, opening equally and simultaneously to both sides. If you feel like you can see, or get close to, 180 degrees, that is great. Doing this, even for a few moments, will usually significantly increase the enjoyment of walking or moving forward in space. Your experience will almost immediately change to a more expansive quality, and you will probably feel something akin to a “lightness” about the task right away. (1) The message of this aspect of the exercise is that you are part of a larger context that your micro-moments are just part of. You are receptive to your environment, and you don’t have to be hyper-aware of your contribution to it, there is already plenty going on, and much is already in progress, you are responding to it from a place of relaxed, receptive awareness.
After doing it for a while, you might expand your imaginative faculties to try to “see” the full 360 degrees of the horizon.
Maintaining Focus
You will naturally feel compelled to check in with how the terrain you are traversing is changing or to anticipate some obstacle. Usually, this is unnecessary, but if you have to negotiate an anomaly in the path that needs addressing, you should, of course, do so, but you will feel the need to look down unnecessarily as well. When you feel that impulse, you will notice it, not accommodate it, and let it pass. This aspect of the practice is important because you are not holding your tendency back, you are not holding your attention on the horizon out of some militant duty and fighting any urge to look down. You are simply choosing where your attention goes, and when impulses to the contrary arise, they are treated as part of the landscape of your current experience and ultimately let go.
Application To The Creative Process
There are a variety of ways this practice can be used to direct your attention creatively, but we promised its applicability to musical development. This can also be applied to any creative process.
If you play in a group setting, you can use this same exercise, replacing walking with playing and the horizon as the ensemble or larger musical context. This can also be used for solo creative contexts. You can visualize a horizon or even a specific horizon you used as a focus during a particularly successful Horizonal Procession. This is all that is required to adapt the practice, open your visual field, and bring in the feeling, recalled from Horizonal Procession, of being part of a larger context than the task you are performing. Don’t close your eyes to do it, keep them open. The practice creates a result similar to the above example of allocating energy along the lines of listening more than you are playing. Practicing this with the reinforcement of the processional exercise makes it easier to access and gives the practice foundation in an experience that is not just musical. The operative theory here is that the more comprehensive your range of references for the experience you are trying to create, the more real you can make it.
To go back to our original example of creating music based on a story, the more real your story is to you, the better equipped you are to conjure it. I have developed these practices to leverage the power of simple, real tasks for productive, useful artistic expression. They are not hypothetical worlds; they are experiences. When I was in the conservatory and would finally grasp something my teacher had been trying to explain to me for a long time, he would say, 'Remember that feeling!' These practices are called somatic because they use physical movement as a focal point for creating a specific quality of attention beneficial in various circumstances, including time-based art forms. The exercise creates a feeling to remember.
The great thing about the exercise is that it allows you to create the feeling out of a simple task, as opposed to a complex one like the fine motor skills needed to play an instrument. The effect of the exercise amplifies itself when used as a reference point because, just as you took your mind off the particular task of moving forward in space to connect to a more expansive context of the horizon when you reference that experience, you are also taking your attention away from the specific task of forming notes on your instrument and opening up to a larger context that you are a part of.
Of course, all trained artists can do this to an extent but will often begin to lose the larger context the more duress they are under in a creative situation. This is the point at which the exercise can help maintain that expansive, or horizonal, focus. Suppose you are under stress or pressure that has you at your limit in some way with your medium. In that case, you draw in the ability to maintain horizonal focus to avoid the equivalent of looking at the ground right in front of you while performing your artistic task. When you become self-conscious, your perspective becomes small, and mistakes start to build on themselves. You move slowly, and years of well-honed instincts become inexplicably unavailable. Your sense of time becomes distorted in the same way that looking down at the ground makes the journey seem long. If I could describe my own experience with the exercise, there is a sense that you are pulled where you are looking or that you invoke the draw of your focus whether narrow or expansive. While creating, our minds negotiate complex tasks and coordinate cause and effect between our minds, bodies, and mediums. Using the Horizonal Procession model creates a simple analogy from an experience that can be used to untangle mired moments in the creative process, and it can also be used to improve moments in the creative process that are already unfolding as intended. Just like in the exercise you deploy in space, when you feel your focus contracting to what you are doing to the exclusion of your environment, observe the tendency and return to the horizonal focus.
Works Cited:
Yaribeygi, H. (2020, August 14). Vision and breathing may be the secrets to surviving 2020. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vision-and-breathing-may-be-the-secrets-to-surviving-2020/