I was driving in my car and an interview came on the radio with Philip Glass, the American composer. Since I was driving, I couldn’t take notes, but I remembered one thing he said very clearly and as soon as I got home I wrote it down. He said:
I write music, not technique.
This statement resonated with me (how appropriate!) and my practise of aikido, and made me want to know more about his life and what had lead him to make this statement. He certainly wasn’t saying that he had abandoned technique, because from 1964 to 1966 he studied technique in Paris with the composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. He later said: “The composers I studied with Boulanger are the people I still think about most—Bach and Mozart,” and these were men who not only were geniuses but also technically expert. In fact, at the time Glass disliked the new music of composers like Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen.
It seems to me that he was saying once he’d learned technique he had to move on from it in order to write music. He has also said:
The point was that the world of music—its language, beauty, and mystery—was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun. Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The “out there” stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.
But he couldn’t truly make that connection between “inner” and “outer” music until he had learned technique.
To me there is a clear parallel between Glass’s experience and the learning of aikido.
We move from being gotai (static – often referred to as kihon or basic) in our practice to jutai (flexible) to ryutai or ki-no-nagare(flowing), but a solid foundation must be established in gotai technique before moving on to ki-no-nagare, and then it is necessary to continue training gotai to prevent losing touch with the basics.
Or to put it another way, a person who is proficient in gotai can easily learn ki-no-nagare, but a person who has only trained in ki-no-nagare will often not be able to move at all if gripped strongly. Indeed, the founder of Aikido, O-Sensei Morihei Ueshiba, once said, “I am what I am today only because I did gotai training for 50 years.”
And this statement pretty matches up to what Glass says about himself. Although he has been described as a “minimalist composer”, he refers to himself as a “classicist”, pointing out that he trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He continues to practise the basics.
Of course, this is one of the hardest things about aikido. There is nothing more confusing (and irritating) to a student than to see the instructor perform some elaborate flowing technique, and then be told “It’s all about the basics.” It’s difficult for the student see how his or her plodding steps are related to the sensei’s dynamic movement.
And it can also be difficult for the instructor to appreciate how to an observer his or her precise movements can get lost in the twirl of the hakama and the flight of the uke.
I have mentioned before the book “Outliers” in which the author Malcolm Gladwell calculates it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. Since publication other research has called that statement into question as it does overlook genetic factors and innate talent, but the principle still applies.
And the trouble is, after practising basics for 10,000 hours, so that you are able to create the inner music in the outside world, you may forget what it was like to be a beginner in the first place.
Terry Dobson, an American who studied under Ueshiba in the 1960s says O’Sensei never taught technique. He said “He [Ueshiba] was not a tennis pro. For him aikido was not a technical exercise at all. It was part of a play of spirit, a movement of the universe”, and so classes could involve long lectures. Terry Dobson again:
He would come in every morning and teach, but his teaching was largely talking … Sometimes he would pray and you would sit there.
This then is the problem for both teachers and students. How does the one teach and how does the other learn? I would say that the important thing is for the instructor never to forget how hard it was to get where they are now, the frustrations and humiliations, the feeling of one step forward and two steps back.
Of course, part of the problem in aikido is, as Terry Dobson said, the answer to any question is “Just keep practising and you’ll find out.” So the instructor has to help and encourage the student to keep practising, because ultimately he or she is trying to lead students to the moment where they discover they too can compose the music of aikido.
But not even all that support and encouragement will prevent the famous black belt slump. When starting out, the black belt represents the ultimate goal that is as it should be. It appears to be the highest mountain, but when you get there you discover it is merely one of the lower peaks at the edge of a vast, unseen mountain range. Some black belts never see the view and quit because they think they have climbed Everest, and others become dispirited with the thought of “just more practice”.
I’m sure that not everyone who studied alongside Philip Glass at Juilliard went on to be world-famous composers, but not everyone can be an Ueshiba, a Tohei, Saito or even Seagal!
But to finish with some more of Philip Glass’s words which clearly reflect some kind of universal truth:
You practise and you get better. It’s very simple.