Balance
"The focus of this study lies between going and stabilizing. It is the charged balancing point where they meet, the now." (Burrows, ix)
During the past 18 months, much of what I have done (or not done) has been out of necessity; it had to happen, but also depleted my tank of energy and joy. Many of the activities I relied on to fill that tank—teaching in person, visiting with family and friends, travel to unfamiliar spaces, wandering through the grocery store for an hour with no agenda but to dream about outrageous menu plans—were not available to me during these first waves of the pandemic. I, like many people, felt stuck. Trapped. “Out of control” in the sense that I had no control.
I also spent a lot of time reading in the past 18 months; I read mostly for research, building foundational bases for a few projects that I’m working on. I found joy in reading outside of my discipline, seeing my own ideas reflected on the pages of books and articles by people who (mostly) don’t work in music. They used words I wasn’t familiar with to explain and explore concepts that yanked my musical ideas into focus. I found resonance in game design, interactive systems design, HCI, cartography, fabrication, civil engineering, linguistics. Most of my education in music has been about music: composing, reading, listening, score study, composing, performing, more listening, more reading, more composing, teaching, rehearsing. As I continue to teach and compose and research, to collaborate and perform, I understand more fully that in order to communicate effectively and respectfully, I must find the common spaces and vocabularies with my collaborators, students, audiences, and peers. Reading outside of my discipline has helped expand my view of the work I do in music, and has also reminded me that people are tackling many of the same problems I face in composing in their own fields. What are our common questions? Where is the overlap? How can I better understand the bigger picture and my role within it by learning from people far-removed from my field of focus?
The quote above really caught me when I read it because David Burrows presented a few terms in ways I hadn’t yet considered. Upon seeing this new-to-me vantage point, I quickly folded these premises into my own philosophies:
Motion/moving = going. Not moving/no motion = stabilizing.
Engaging with the present moment = finding balance between going and stabilizing.
When I am still, I am not stationary or stagnant: I am balanced, I am engaged.
My work has always been about balancing the spinning plates of my own identity; I have felt institutional pressures to choose one to prioritize (usually “composer”) in service of becoming an expert in that area and thus having value. I navigate this dance daily; each plate always spinning, always variable, never in a fixed position in relation to the others, and honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way!
I wonder, too, about the concept of the “delicate balance.” After reading Burrows and the many others who have shown me just how simultaneously big and small the world of making is, maybe the term leans less toward the sense of fragile teetering that so often accompanies it, and more to that space between moving and stabilizing where we can find an honest, engaged, embodied presence—one mechanism in a complex system of parts all doing their best to navigate their own delicate balances alongside ours.
Burrows, David. Time and the Warm Body: A musical perspective on the construction of time. Boston: Brill, 2007
