Sean Carroll's Mindscape #104: David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity. I was blitzing my way through the transcript and came across this passage and just lost it:
0:56:44 David Rosen: Yeah, it is all happening in real time, sometimes as fast as 240 plus beats per minute with cords changing perhaps at every quarter note or every half note, and… So it was amazing in which some of the greatest jazz musicians say things like Miles Davis famous quote, I’ll play and I’ll tell you what it is later seems like it’s amazing, these eminent performers, these anecdotal response to show that they’re actually letting go, they’re releasing that cognitive control to be in more of a state, which I think they’re familiar with the state also in terms of being that experience in terms of getting there and are able to enter that state more easily of relaxing and performing kind of in a bottom-up sensory kind of way.
0:57:37 Sean Miles: Yeah, I wouldn’t venture to compare myself to Miles Davis, even though we share the Miles part of the name, but Dave and I had a presentation that we worked really, really, really super hard on, and we kinda did this kind of surprising thing because we’re kind of doing this meta-demonstration of the surprise effect of the music, and when we finally did the presentation, which was like this is in Nashville at the BMI building in front of a bunch of industry executives… Music industry executives. It was about six minutes long, and so there was a musical part of it, and we get to the Break, the musical break after the first verse, that is the course and the second verse starts and I had the feeling… I don’t know if you know Sean, like when you wake up when you’re on vacation somewhere and you’re jet lagged and you just wake up and you don’t know where you are.
0:58:29 Sean Carroll: All that time.
0:58:29 Sean Miles: That… Yeah, so that’s how I felt, but I was on stage in the middle of the performance and I was highly engaged in it it was like I was carrying the performance and I felt like I was waking up, I didn’t remember anything that happened before, and we were three minutes into the performance.
0:58:46 Sean Carroll: Right and I think that… Help me get it straight here, so there’s this saying that If you’re not an expert, if you have not practiced as much, if you’re just an amateur you’re just learning. Improvisation, maybe creativity more generally, but at least improvisation is more of a system two thing ’cause you’re thinking it, you’re overthinking it or you’re trying to control it very much, and then through training, it becomes a system one thing, it became subconscious and automatic.
I'm tired of hearing and reading of people who are surprised that (good) musicians are "actually letting go, they’re releasing that cognitive control to be in more of a state..." Actually, you mean, actually, really and truly letting go? Where have you been all these years, what cave? That's old hat, it really really is.
Gimme a break! And you know what, it's the same for classical musicians, and they're not making it up at all. They're playing from a score. But to deliver a convincing performance you've got to let go, you've got to let the score play you. Listen to this, it's happening to/with Carreras and To Kanawa:
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