brettworks

If you’re a musician of some experience you know things about music not from the outside, as a listener, but from your body, as a practitioner. Trust the hands is the heuristic of letting your understanding unfold through your playing. Whether at a keyboard, fretboard, or computer, your hands come to know a musical-instrumental terrain before conscious you does, finding cool chords, filigree patterns, melodies that soar, structures that flow, cadences hidden in plain sight. Trusting your hands doesn’t solve the problem of how to compose, but does remove some mystery from how composing happens. New music happens, initially, through playing-to-find-things-out, improvising and exploring, asking What about this?, experimenting to find something that works. Playing, to borrow the title of a Wallace Stevens poem, manifests not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself. Knowing things with your body is trusting the hands to play an instrument to find the thing itself that’s workable as the music’s essential idea.