This is how Delacroix described Chopin's unexpected notes, those which, during his improvisations, led to the improbable : this insane color...
EMOTION
What moves us are the modulations. In English, we literally say "to be moved" that means textually "to be in movement". In other words : "in motion". "Motion" again in English, is what moves, what creates the movement. By modulating a vibration, I allow myself to feel even more the movements of the life through myself. To feel myself alive !
Emotions are not an enemy but, on the contrary, what works in me to make life circulate, giving me more knowledge, more awareness of myself. To explain hypnosis, my second passion, I often say that it is about "putting the mind in motion", like a psychic yoga. So most often by going through the emotion.
Emotion is the signpost that leads us to the right path. Not the one that our mind tells us to make us believe that we would go to the left when in fact we were on the right without knowing it... As our body tells us hot or cold, tight or relaxed, emotion tells us even better than all the verbs in our mouth, what our being - consciously or unconsciously - is experiencing : loss (sadness), rejection (anger), completeness (joy), insecurity (fear)...
For me, art is not reduced to a beauty that we would come to contemplate outside of ourselves. It is this reminder of our emotions : the movement of life.
When Chopin improvised, there was always this moment, says George Sand, where a foreign note came to melt in the original color. Just as a painter leaves room for the inspiration of a mixture on his pallet of nuances, the musician creates new universes, sometimes from a single note. It only takes one note, a priori outside the initial harmony, to lead to other unknown lands. This is what we call "modulating" towards other tonalities... And it is what Delacroix named "the blue note" in Chopin.
As if this "blue" plunged us into reverie ("hypnosis ?", others would say), I don't know if it is an ocean blue or the blue of our great earth globe...
Without these "foreign notes", no modulation would be possible, or so abruptly that one would quickly get tired of it.
But let's go further.
THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE
In therapy, we often speak of "wounds" from childhood. Even "fundamental wounds". I am thinking here of the French author Lise Bourbeau who has done a considerable work on these analyses. However, the artist in me, on the way to alchemy, had a click.
By experience, I note that at each place where a person believes to have a fragility, a "wound", a defect... it is from this place in reality that it creates the most spectacular transformation, that it draws its very singular force.
Indeed, how many shy actors have become charismatic worldwide ? From stutterers to communication geniuses ? From unloved people to transmitters of self-love ?
I remember a music theory teacher telling me this anecdote that stayed with me throughout my training : it is often those who have the most rhythmic difficulties who become professional percussionists ! Simply because they put more energy there, at the beginning of their musical studies, to improve their sense of rhythm. Until they become experts.
That's why I've felt more and more like replacing the term "wound" with the term "nugget". That of the alchemist who, from his philosopher's stone - which would be nothing as such, without knowledge - creates gold. Others would speak of the hero's journey : the one where we believe we have to go through a series of trials or adventures, through a whole world, to realize that everything was there, in itself, but was only waiting for our consciousness to really reveal itself.
It is then enough to have a tiny shift, a note sometimes beside, to really find this new horizon. To move away to better know "home". Yet it is not so necessary to go far to find one's genius ! Because what we take for handicaps would be, in reality, our alchemist's nugget. There, close by, waiting only for our gaze, our embrace, in a word : our conscience.
AN ASSUMED DEFECT IS A CLAIMED ARTISTIC CHOICE
If Thelonious Monk had sought the dexterity of other pianists, he would not have been able to transmit to us his extraordinary universe with his stiff fingers running down improbable scales of fourths... If the pianist Wittgenstein had not returned from the war with his right hand amputated, we might never have discovered Maurice Ravel's immense concerto for the left hand. Someone once told me about an exceptional conductor for his art of balance, which I had already noticed when listening to his recordings. Now, this musician admitted to me that in reality this conductor had a poor ear but that this, precisely, forced him to want to clarify always more, to make audible and to be able to hear everything to validate it, which makes his interpretations transparent of clarity...
This is not to praise suffering. On the contrary. It is changing the interpretation of the score. In this we are creators. Here starts the real "art".
Michelangelo had sculpted a marble a priori defective and had used this "defect" to make a singular work. Rodin had done the same with the bust of Balzac by playing on the requirements of the customers but without answering them otherwise than by his genius, i.e. by accentuating the feature still where others would have wanted to decrease it.
LOVE
Personal development tells us one true thing : you will not "cure" your emotions once and for all and you will not move forward "without fear". But you will, from now on, know how to "deal with it", to move forward with more drive than fear, with more love than hate - towards yourself. This is what happens when we truly embrace our emotions, this movement of each wave creating the ocean through its tossing. It moves, yes. It is up to us to choose to ride the wave, to surf or to want to hold on so much believing that there would be something else than this great ocean...
In wanting "otherwise", "differently" from what is, we forget that the law of transformation begins by "embracing" and that only then, the dragon in our arms, there is only freedom to be.
"Behind the worst is love" said French writer Christiane Singer at the moment of her passage, that moment of the great mystery... having gone through the worst suffering, she found the epiphany. Grace. When there is nothing left, there is love. This is the hero's journey. Behind the terrifying dragon, a "splash" tells us that there was nothing so frightening as long as the heart acts. With every gesture, with every intention... Simple. Easy as pie !
Is this why French film director Claude Lelouch titled his latest film L'Amour, c'est mieux que la vie ? ("Love is better than life")
In the 19th century, artists already knew this and, from what I perceive, they put all the light of a conscience even in the deepest darkness.
So, all it takes is a note...
And I wish you a happy month of love to each of you !
Through the heart and the notes,
Hélène Tysman
