This is a 15 minute read + 30 minutes of movement activities.
Introduction
Have you ever wondered why the brain is divided into a left and right hemisphere? Scientists have been trying to uncover the purpose of what they call “brain lateralization” for over a hundred years. Modern neuroscientists have amassed some incredible findings from research with stroke victims and split-brained patients that demonstrate the unique functions of each hemisphere, but they leave it up to us to discern what this means for us personally. It’s an exciting time to be alive and to have a brain!
The first part of this blog post will outline the key differences between right and left brain and the second part will explore what brain lateralization could mean for us as musicians.
Here’s what’s included in this post:
What Brain Lateralization is Not
Many myths pervade: the right brain is feminine; the left brain is logical; artists use their right brain; mathematicians use their left brain more. None of this is true. All people, except those with brain damage due to stroke or injury, use their corpus callosum to maintain constant communication between the two sides of the brain all the time.
One might suggest that a person employs more “left-brain dominant” thinking patterns when they are in an overly rational and sticky brain state or that they are more “right-brain dominant” when they are very intuitive and comfortable with ambiguity. However, the idea that some people are right-brained and others are left-brained is not supported by research.
Scientists have primarily discovered differences between right and left brain function when one side of the brain is disabled through injury or medical intervention, and findings from these extreme scenarios can not be readily applied to a normal, healthy brain. Often the concept of brain lateralization is used as more of an informal metaphor. Using it as a speculative exploration to gain deeper insight into our thought patterns can still be useful even when not factually correct.
What We Know About Lateralization
The Left Brain and the Parts
Here’s what we do know: The left brain is responsible for fixed knowledge. This means it deals with words, symbols, and facts that are so concrete they are not up for debate (ex. 2+2=4 or the capital of the United States is Washington D.C.). A musical example of the left brain’s way of knowing could be that the word ritardando means to gradually slow down. The left brain attends to learned musical patterns and basic rhythms. The left brain employs narrowly focused attention and prizes certainty. The left brain deals with “the what.”
The Right Brain and the Whole
The right brain attends to the sort of knowledge that requires a body. It processes our non-verbal, lived, sensory, and emotional experiences. It’s personal, relational, and contextual. The right brain’s way of knowing is unique to each individual. The unique sensation of feeling a gradually larger space between each pitch during a ritardando is a right brain process. The right brain attends to movement, flow of time, metaphor, and novelty. It maintains broad and open attention and can follow multiple ambiguities without resolving them. The right brain deals with “the how.”
The Complexity of Music Making
Music uses the brain in the most complex way imaginable, and both sides of the brain are actively communicating all of the time through the corpus callosum which joins the two sides. Experiencing music as a listener or a player generally would be thought of as a right brain dominant activity as it requires a massive amount of relational understanding, novelty. Music is unique in its ability to speak directly to our emotions. However, musicians must also be skilled at quick recall of patterns, which is a specialty of the left brain.
Research has shown that professional musicians engage the left brain more for the processing of music when compared with non-musicians. This makes sense; musical patterns must become concrete pieces of knowledge to be able to reliably execute them on demand. What happens though, when that concrete pattern becomes so dominant that we lose sight of its relation to movement, time, and emotion?
In “The neuro-pianist” neuroscience researchers speculate about memory slips, stating:
Concert performances may involve high levels of stress. If musicians begin to doubt their knowledge of a musical text, they may consequently doubt their ability to automatically execute sequential motor action required to play the same musical text. Such hesitation may drive the performer to use alternative motor planning strategies, namely, on-line movement-by-movement planning.
To put it in other words: under pressure, the pianist may revert to thinking about individual notes and individual movements, rather than whole phrases and gestures, causing the performance to devolve into complete and utter chaos. The fear response and need for certainty seems to cause a sort of tunnel vision phenomenon, as well as the loss of the contextual awareness that glues things together. In some ways this is comparable to the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. We can sense that the word want is almost in reach, but the harder we try to find and speak the word, the further away it moves. Usually, after we’ve moved on, the word once again appears.
Activating the Right Brain
Playing music becomes easier when we intentionally create learning situations that activate the right brain’s intuitive, contextual, and sensory capabilities. The best performances move both audience and player through a deeply visceral relationship that is beyond words. The recent explosion of AI shows that robots still cannot fully emulate the way we think, and machines certainly don’t have the stuff necessary to play music. A body and a right brain are required for a sense of cohesion and depth of understanding.
Getting Unstuck
When I see a person playing in a way that is overly anxious, narrowly focused, and dominated by a need for certainty, I know it’s time to engage the right brain. The two exercises below provide two short experiences of “off the bench” activities that employ novelty, bring in greater context, and focus on the embodied experience of moving and playing.
Activity 1 - Layers of Phrasing
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze observed that many fully grown pianists had excellent technical training, yet their performances were utterly unmoving. To remedy this he devised a method of music education to help musicians deepen their physical understanding of time, space, energy, and pitch. This activity is inspired by Dalcroze’s belief that the body was the first instrument.
Before you begin:
If you have an instrument handy, sight read through “Tale” by Xaver Scharwenka both before and after completing this activity. Click here to download the score.
Notice if you encounter a feeling of uncertainty as you go through these steps. If so, how do you manage the uncertainty?
Notice how it feels to practice the parts separately versus as a whole.
Notice how your experience of the piece change after having completed this exercise.
Overview: Perform each step below to the recording of “Tale” Op 62, No. 2 by Xaver Scharwenka. You may repeat this as many times as needed.
Step 1: Take steps to the beat of the music
Step 2: Paint the phrases. Draw one long continuous line for each phrase with a musical breath in between.
Did you draw big phrases or long phrases? Four bars or two bars?
If you drew long phrases, try drawing short phrases. If you drew short phrases, try drawing long phrases.
Draw long phrases in one arm, and short phrases in the other arm.
Step 3: Show the climax of the piece by moving in one continuous motion from low to high. Squat and move the entire body from low to high, or simply move the arms in the vertical space. This requires very slow movement.
Step 4: Assemble the parts. Walk to the beat while drawing long phrases with one arm, short phrases with the other arm, and using the whole body to show the climax of the excerpt.
Recently I taught a simple movement exercise of clapping eighth notes while stepping quarter notes to a fifth grade piano student. When I asked her to explain to me what we were practicing she replied “You are playing piano and your playing is speaking directly to my body, telling it what to do.” Although the answer I had hoped for was “stepping quarters”, I was overjoyed that her take away was a sense of amazement at the music’s power to speak directly to the body.
It’s not that music is too imprecise for words, but too precise.” - Felix Mendelssohn
Activity 2 - Opening and Closing the Hand
The next activity is an exploration of the movements of the hand and fingers. This is an excellent strategy to improve dexterity and remove tension in the hands and forearms. Although this exercise is focused purely on the movement element of playing, I’ve seen it completely transform a person’s tone from flat and dull to a magical, ringing, and projected sound, in as little as ten minutes.
The YouTube video will take you through a short Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement Lesson for the hand. Play your instrument before and after, and notice if there are any changes to the sound quality and sensation in the body.
Help! There are gremlins in my fingers!
Below you will find some signs that a person might be stuck in a left-brain dominant approach to playing. In my experience, activities that engage the right brain help resolve these problems.
Lacking in expressivity and emotion
Over-reliance on visual references
Holding/grasping for positions
Stereotyped/restricted movement
Repertoire grows worse with practice
High levels of anxiety and fear
Difficulty finding flow in playing
Difficulty playing combined rhythms
Difficulty playing hands together
“Tip of the tongue” phenomenon
Difficulty with memorization
Obsessed with “getting it right”
A Summary of Holistic Approaches
There are as many ways to practice piano as there are people, and it’s great to experiment with a variety of approaches. The following principles will guide you towards a more holistic and fully embodied way of practicing. If you would like to infuse your teaching and playing with these principles I highly suggest attending a workshop in Dalcroze Eurythmics, Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement, or something similar!
Context - Use movement, emotion, and metaphor to build a strong internal sense of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic relationships.
Global Awareness - Bring attention to all parts of the self in relation to music. (breath, emotion, body, movement quality)
Sensory Learning - Craft experiences that highlight the sensory differences between the aural, visual, kinesthetic, emotional parts of the whole. Work towards musical embodiment.
Novelty - Use creative experiences with improvisation, composition, stylistic variety, and playful experimentation to instantly form new connections and deepen understanding.
Low Pressure - A need for certainty and control engages the left brain. To create conditions for optimal brain function we must keep the stakes low and avoid activating the need for certainty.
This blog post includes a free PDF with a quick summary of this information. All of this content was originally created for the 2024 Washington State MTA Conference. If you have a favorite approach to activating the right brain, please share it!
Looking for more?
Check out the online library of resources for enhancing musicianship. This library has 20+ recorded movement lessons for enhancing body awareness and improving posture and technique.
Download the free practice guide. This guide includes a chart of 50+ practice strategies that work to bring in greater context and awareness.
References
Cleese, John, and Dr. Iain McGilchrist. “Are You Insane?! John Cleese and Iain McGilchrist on Neuroscience and Creativity.” YouTube, uploaded by How To Academy Mindset, 2019, 1
Eitan Globerson and Israel Nelken, “The neuro-pianist “Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, Volume 7, Article 35. (1996)
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New expanded edition. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019.
Nachmanovitch, Stephen. The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life. New World Library, 2019.
Nielsen, Jared A et al. “Abnormal lateralization of functional connectivity between language and default mode regions in autism.” Molecular autismvol. 5,1 8. 6 Feb. 2014, doi:10.1186/2040-2392-5-8
Postema, Merel C et al. “Altered structural brain asymmetry in autism spectrum disorder in a study of 54 datasets.” Nature communications vol. 10,1 4958. 31 Oct. 2019, doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13005-8
Scharwenka, Xaver. “A Tale.” Album for the Young, Op. 62, No. 3. First published in 1885 by Breitkopf und Härtel
Savage, Jen and Falkenstein, Bridger, host. “Trauma and the Two Hemispheres.” Beyond Trauma Podcast, 28 March. 2021. https://beyondtraumapodcast.com/2021/03/episode-15-trauma-and-the-two-hemispheres.
