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Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST
NPR “BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR” SELECTION
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming How does time shape consciousness and consciousness, time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time? Uncommon Measure explores these questions from the perspective of a young Korean American who dedicated herself to perfecting her art until performance anxiety forced her to give up the dream of becoming a concert solo violinist. Anchoring her story in illuminating research in neuroscience and quantum physics, Hodges traces her own passage through difficult family dynamics, prejudice, and enormous personal expectations to come to terms with the meaning of a life reimagined—one still shaped by classical music but moving toward the freedom of improvisation.
NPR “BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR” SELECTION
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming How does time shape consciousness and consciousness, time? Do we live in time, or does time live in us? And how does music, with its patterns of rhythm and harmony, inform our experience of time? Uncommon Measure explores these questions from the perspective of a young Korean American who dedicated herself to perfecting her art until performance anxiety forced her to give up the dream of becoming a concert solo violinist. Anchoring her story in illuminating research in neuroscience and quantum physics, Hodges traces her own passage through difficult family dynamics, prejudice, and enormous personal expectations to come to terms with the meaning of a life reimagined—one still shaped by classical music but moving toward the freedom of improvisation.
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 22, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 80 reviews
March 9, 2023
I loved Natalie Hodges' narrative approach in her memoir. As a young girl, all Hodges wanted to be was a violin soloist. Practicing diligently for five and six hours a day, up until the wee hours of the morning, her life was consumed by music. Twenty years later, her professional quest has become unlikely, and she has to cast about for another way to live. In the maelstrom of this decision, Hodges takes up the writing of this memoir.
This book is so tantalizing. Hodges marches through quantum physics and the science of time, suggesting that we may be able to change our relationship with the past by writing about it. I'm willing to consider this as long as the facts stay true. Sometimes what's needed is a new perspective.
She writes about music's connectivity with the flow of time:
"Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events."
Time and thinking process are some of the greatest challenges Hodges faced during performances. She found herself obsessing over making errors and true to her fears, she often would.
"If you can't get into that flow--if your nerves get the best of you and you're dragged onto the shore of self-consciousness--well, chances are you'll mess up that tricky run . . . The flow is staunched, the fabric rent; you feel punched in the gut, knocked out of the music's time and back into your own. And then, afterward, you can feel the seconds and minutes passing; you trudge through, it's all linear, you just want it to be over, you just want to make it to the end."
Although I'm not a musician, I can sympathize with her performance anxiety. I hate public speaking but have a huge admiration for those composed souls who speak so well in front of groups. Now, I have a new appreciation for the musician who has put hours and years of practice into their performances.
Hodges explores the improvisation of Gabriela Montero, a celebrated pianist, and the brain studies that show her brain is working differently than the brains of those who deliver practiced performances. Incredibly fascinating!
She enlightened me on Bach's Chaconne in D minor, which she describes as one of the most difficult pieces a violinist can play. I listened to it on youtube. I'm not a classical connoisseur. To me, it didn't sound beautiful, but the more I listened, the more compelling it became. Some say Bach wrote this as a memorial for his first wife, Maria Barbara, who died while Bach was away from home. Hodges explains that this has been largely debunked, but still the story persists, perhaps because of the deep emotion, perhaps grief that hangs heavy within the Chaconne.
And her chapter on the tango. Exquisite!
A delightful memoir, Hodges relates her relationship with her Korean mother and her father. The story of her life with her parents and her music is the counterpoint melody throughout this beautiful work. I'm always happy to see beautifully written prose, and whether you're familiar with classical music or quantum physics is of no matter; this is skillful, eloquent prose with clarity of thought that provoked my curiosity at every turn.
This book is so tantalizing. Hodges marches through quantum physics and the science of time, suggesting that we may be able to change our relationship with the past by writing about it. I'm willing to consider this as long as the facts stay true. Sometimes what's needed is a new perspective.
She writes about music's connectivity with the flow of time:
"Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events."
Time and thinking process are some of the greatest challenges Hodges faced during performances. She found herself obsessing over making errors and true to her fears, she often would.
"If you can't get into that flow--if your nerves get the best of you and you're dragged onto the shore of self-consciousness--well, chances are you'll mess up that tricky run . . . The flow is staunched, the fabric rent; you feel punched in the gut, knocked out of the music's time and back into your own. And then, afterward, you can feel the seconds and minutes passing; you trudge through, it's all linear, you just want it to be over, you just want to make it to the end."
Although I'm not a musician, I can sympathize with her performance anxiety. I hate public speaking but have a huge admiration for those composed souls who speak so well in front of groups. Now, I have a new appreciation for the musician who has put hours and years of practice into their performances.
Hodges explores the improvisation of Gabriela Montero, a celebrated pianist, and the brain studies that show her brain is working differently than the brains of those who deliver practiced performances. Incredibly fascinating!
She enlightened me on Bach's Chaconne in D minor, which she describes as one of the most difficult pieces a violinist can play. I listened to it on youtube. I'm not a classical connoisseur. To me, it didn't sound beautiful, but the more I listened, the more compelling it became. Some say Bach wrote this as a memorial for his first wife, Maria Barbara, who died while Bach was away from home. Hodges explains that this has been largely debunked, but still the story persists, perhaps because of the deep emotion, perhaps grief that hangs heavy within the Chaconne.
And her chapter on the tango. Exquisite!
A delightful memoir, Hodges relates her relationship with her Korean mother and her father. The story of her life with her parents and her music is the counterpoint melody throughout this beautiful work. I'm always happy to see beautifully written prose, and whether you're familiar with classical music or quantum physics is of no matter; this is skillful, eloquent prose with clarity of thought that provoked my curiosity at every turn.
April 25, 2023
I actually bought this book for my wife rather than myself. She is the musician in the family and devoted many hours learning to play the piano from an early age through college. But I ended up reading this first. It is a memoir of the role that music played in the author’s life. Her mother had loved playing the violin as a girl, and while she encouraged and supported Natalie, she did not force the violin on Natalie or demand the amount of time and effort that Natalie put into the instrument. This is a girl chasing her dream. She was certainly very dedicated and disciplined in the chasing of that dream.
It was the parts of the memoir about Natalie’s relationship with her mother and her instructors that I enjoyed most. There were sections in which Natalie delved into the relationship between music, improvisation, time and quantum physics that were not as engaging for me. I did see how writing this book was helpful to Natalie in understanding what music represented to her.
It was the parts of the memoir about Natalie’s relationship with her mother and her instructors that I enjoyed most. There were sections in which Natalie delved into the relationship between music, improvisation, time and quantum physics that were not as engaging for me. I did see how writing this book was helpful to Natalie in understanding what music represented to her.
March 18, 2022
Natalie Hodges started playing the violin at age three and after numerous performances and awards, she has altered her path in her mid 20s and decided to take a step back from her career as a soloist. This is her story.
With support from her mother and three other siblings, Natalie has been surrounded by music and the love for her violin just about all of her life. It wasn’t uncommon for her to play five to six hours a day – sometimes until 2 a.m. – when she was growing up. She was inseparable from her violin. However, she started to question after practicing complicated pieces over and over again why she would continue to make mistakes in the same place of the music especially on stage.
She began to have doubts in college about her ability to continue as a soloist. It didn’t help when a teacher told her she didn’t have much of a chance. Her mother (pegged as a Korean Tiger Mom) was a Harvard graduate in English and went to law school. She became a prosecutor and administrative law judge. She spent a lot of time helping her children to excel in academics and classical music. When Natalie asked her “When you quit (violin her senior year in High School)…how did you know?” She said, “I think you just know, if and when it is time. For you, the important thing is that you don’t regret and the important thing is that you choose.”
Natalie discovered in her college years that it wasn’t easy to leave something that you’ve surrounded yourself with. “Why keep trying to love something that doesn’t love you back.” She now had a sense of “empty time” in her life and had to go through some adjustments.
It’s a short book with 179 pages but it takes some time to digest and could be one of those books that you’d want to read over again to pick up some other thoughts that may have been missed. She reveals personal thoughts on prejudice with a Korean mom and relationships with her father. This is an interesting book especially for musicians like her that try to make sense out of their performances. Natalie said after a while, “I began to experience a unity of body and mind…I felt them working together in a rhythmic tandem.” Through interviews and research, she has now taken music to a new level through science --- letting go of control and trusting your body with a connection to others.
After reading this book, I had to google Natalie Hodges with one of her violin performances; it was pure joy. I’m sure her talents have touched a lot of people.
With support from her mother and three other siblings, Natalie has been surrounded by music and the love for her violin just about all of her life. It wasn’t uncommon for her to play five to six hours a day – sometimes until 2 a.m. – when she was growing up. She was inseparable from her violin. However, she started to question after practicing complicated pieces over and over again why she would continue to make mistakes in the same place of the music especially on stage.
She began to have doubts in college about her ability to continue as a soloist. It didn’t help when a teacher told her she didn’t have much of a chance. Her mother (pegged as a Korean Tiger Mom) was a Harvard graduate in English and went to law school. She became a prosecutor and administrative law judge. She spent a lot of time helping her children to excel in academics and classical music. When Natalie asked her “When you quit (violin her senior year in High School)…how did you know?” She said, “I think you just know, if and when it is time. For you, the important thing is that you don’t regret and the important thing is that you choose.”
Natalie discovered in her college years that it wasn’t easy to leave something that you’ve surrounded yourself with. “Why keep trying to love something that doesn’t love you back.” She now had a sense of “empty time” in her life and had to go through some adjustments.
It’s a short book with 179 pages but it takes some time to digest and could be one of those books that you’d want to read over again to pick up some other thoughts that may have been missed. She reveals personal thoughts on prejudice with a Korean mom and relationships with her father. This is an interesting book especially for musicians like her that try to make sense out of their performances. Natalie said after a while, “I began to experience a unity of body and mind…I felt them working together in a rhythmic tandem.” Through interviews and research, she has now taken music to a new level through science --- letting go of control and trusting your body with a connection to others.
After reading this book, I had to google Natalie Hodges with one of her violin performances; it was pure joy. I’m sure her talents have touched a lot of people.
January 4, 2022
For every musician, this book is a must read. It helps with performance anxiety and gives an excellent perspective on how music is performed scientifically. Insights include information only a performer could understand. Outsiders can take a peek of how one thinks during one's performance. It really should be recommended reading for all classical musicians.
The author shares insights about improvisation versus rote performance for a classical musician. She shares an example of a performer who excels in improvisation and even shares the YouTube link.
My favorite chapter is Symmetry Breaking because the author talks about tiger mom, excelling beyond expectations, racism, implicit bias and most of all her mom. I also felt sad for her story about her dad, but it's part of her narrative that she shared with the world. As a Korean-American musician, she shares her insights living between two worlds in the US. Readers are hungry to read about this world that so many diverse voices are anxious to share with all.
For a debut novel, this book is amazing in rhythm, cadence and insights. I can't wait to see her upcoming novels and look forward to hearing her tell more stories to the world.
Some of my favorite phrases: "a slow Baroque-style fugue unrolled itself from her fingertips..." (P 77); immigrant credo: to be able to give your children what you did not have yourself (p. 82).
I met the author during a book conference in early October 2021. I think I assisted in opening up all the books so she could sign them for attendees. Then, she helped me with a pile of donated books and walked me to my car. I told her I would read her book before 2021 ended. I finally got some quiet time to read it. I absolutely love it and will keep it in my book shelf to read annually. I read and reread some passages that I couldn't let go.
No one knows that I used to play numerous instruments, including the piano. I started playing at 5 and ended it around 17. This book really put in words how I felt leaving that musical part of me. Had I read this book during my high school years, I probably would not go through so much angst. This book is healing me and I feel a little sad that it took two days for me to read it.
The author shares insights about improvisation versus rote performance for a classical musician. She shares an example of a performer who excels in improvisation and even shares the YouTube link.
My favorite chapter is Symmetry Breaking because the author talks about tiger mom, excelling beyond expectations, racism, implicit bias and most of all her mom. I also felt sad for her story about her dad, but it's part of her narrative that she shared with the world. As a Korean-American musician, she shares her insights living between two worlds in the US. Readers are hungry to read about this world that so many diverse voices are anxious to share with all.
For a debut novel, this book is amazing in rhythm, cadence and insights. I can't wait to see her upcoming novels and look forward to hearing her tell more stories to the world.
Some of my favorite phrases: "a slow Baroque-style fugue unrolled itself from her fingertips..." (P 77); immigrant credo: to be able to give your children what you did not have yourself (p. 82).
I met the author during a book conference in early October 2021. I think I assisted in opening up all the books so she could sign them for attendees. Then, she helped me with a pile of donated books and walked me to my car. I told her I would read her book before 2021 ended. I finally got some quiet time to read it. I absolutely love it and will keep it in my book shelf to read annually. I read and reread some passages that I couldn't let go.
No one knows that I used to play numerous instruments, including the piano. I started playing at 5 and ended it around 17. This book really put in words how I felt leaving that musical part of me. Had I read this book during my high school years, I probably would not go through so much angst. This book is healing me and I feel a little sad that it took two days for me to read it.
April 12, 2022
Uncommon Measure was a thrill to read. As we walk through Hodges’ past, her anxieties, and her memories we get to view them from different perspectives. She recounts the moments of her past (performance anxiety, her father leaving, her mother’s immigration hardships) and how she felt when they happened. Then she swiftly brings you to how they make her feel now. This is followed by the science of time, as she figures out what these different emotions mean in relation to her past, present, and future. This book is somehow a hopeful reimagining of perceived regrets and fears. The sense that “time is what we make it” is presented in a way that feels achievable, and is backed by science and experience. We are connected to her through this exploration of time, and what it means to be these particles polarizing to the same tune. Even if our perceptions aren’t exactly the same, even if what we have now isn’t what we originally thought it would be, we can find each other through these stretches of time, and improvise the rest.
July 19, 2023
Natalie’s writing is compelling, honest and full of empathy as she dissects her love for classical music and why she had such crippling performance anxiety that she decided to stop playing the violin (at least on stage) after devoting nearly 20 years to it. This memoir is a beautiful ode to music—its power both in its technical form and in its ability to move us. Most of the quantam physics stuff went over my head but the book made me think about music in fasinating new ways and understand it better too.
April 15, 2022
I was drawn to Natalie Hodges’ Uncommon Measure in part by the subtitle, “A Journey through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time.” A book combining such disparate topics should be an intellectual high.
In terms of subject matter, Hodges delivers. “The Science of Time” alone is fascinating; the nature of time, its directionality, and the role of memory in re-shaping the past all make interesting reading. Then there’s Hodges’ music—endless study on the violin, performance anxiety, the nature of improvisation, career ambitions, parental oversight and intrusion, competition with peers…There’s so much here, not to mention the intersection of these topics one to another.
Somehow “so much” becomes “too much.” Though I enjoyed the many topics addressed, I can’t summarize Hodges’ main point of view; I can’t explain how her story coalesces into a coherent whole. Ultimately, my curiosity was stimulated, but my reading satisfaction was curtailed.
In terms of subject matter, Hodges delivers. “The Science of Time” alone is fascinating; the nature of time, its directionality, and the role of memory in re-shaping the past all make interesting reading. Then there’s Hodges’ music—endless study on the violin, performance anxiety, the nature of improvisation, career ambitions, parental oversight and intrusion, competition with peers…There’s so much here, not to mention the intersection of these topics one to another.
Somehow “so much” becomes “too much.” Though I enjoyed the many topics addressed, I can’t summarize Hodges’ main point of view; I can’t explain how her story coalesces into a coherent whole. Ultimately, my curiosity was stimulated, but my reading satisfaction was curtailed.
March 14, 2023
this book is ostensibly about music, time, and imporivsation but is in fact all about how i’m in love
May 5, 2022
An unusual, elegant approach to understanding performance anxiety (present-day and past reflections, Boston and Denver): In this thought-provoking, fascinating, and melancholy memoir, Natalie Hodges, a classical violinist, takes us into the intellectual and emotional experiences she went through to make a brave, life-changing decision to give up her professional dreams of becoming a solo violinist.
In Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, she twists the title with her uncommon memoir, elevating her personal stumbling block to higher ground in the form of scientific and scholarly inquiries in chapters that feel more essayist than memoiristic.
Common measure is a musical term for the most common time signature in which the rhythm of the music beats 1, 2, 3, 4. (See Hodges explain this in an interview.) The concept of common time, she writes, meshes with “communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others.” Part of that idea is that music is a universal language, so when we sit in an auditorium or concert hall we feel in sync with the audience sharing the music’s emotions.
This interpretation relates to the fundamental issue she struggles with: not feeling at one with others she performs with and unable to lose herself in the music along with the audience. Instead, she cannot breakthrough her “self-absorbed, interior time” – her self-consciousness and anxiety that she’ll “mess up” so “nothing flows.”
Although she’s performed on stages in the US, Paris, and Italy attaining technical mastery as a classical violinist, this wasn’t enough to be a solo artist. When you’ve spent practically your whole life practicing and loving the violin and the music, her emotions and professional judgments are profound. Between the beauty of her prose and the beauty of her passion for the music, we feel for her because she’s amazingly disciplined and committed.
Uncommonly too, her purpose comes across as not trying to pull our heartstrings, seeking our sympathy. Rather, as a Harvard trained musicologist she seeks a deeper understanding how the brain connects to music, time, and flow to advance her insight into what keeps happening to her. By writing it down, she’s making sense of her performance anxiety for herself, and then for us to apply to any endeavor, musical or not, which demands intense focus. In the process, she’s also experimenting with her dual interest: a literary life. With this memoir, she’s established herself as an independent and creative thinker with a writing future.
I don’t pretend to understand the science and theories – neuroscience, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics – nor, as a non-musician, the musicology. You don’t have to, and, interestingly, it contributes to why you’re drawn to the writing, marveling at the difficult path she took to try to “break out” of her self-fears and make an extremely difficult and honest decision after devoting twenty years to her artistry since she was a young girl practicing five, six hours a day, eight before a performance.
Hodges lets us into the mind of a perfectionist, intellectually and psychologically. We can’t help but be awed by her ability to play the most complex of musical compositions for the violin, to such a degree that she precisely knows when and where she’ll falter on stage. She’s her worst enemy. Her predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her acute self-awareness overwhelms her ability to rely on “muscle memory” to get into the flow.
The concept of flow first came on the scene in 1990 when Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a word you hear in educational circles describing gifted kids who can focus intensely for hours on end.
Hodges doesn’t cite the “Father of Flow.” Instead, she digs deeper and more specific, introducing us to another psychologist and neuroscientist at Tufts University who’s influenced her thinking, Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel. He uses the cognitive concept of “entrainment” to explain being in sync with music. Defined as “the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat” – not just that we “hear beats” but we “feel beats” – his research has turned “human entrainment into a theory of perception.” You can listen to a trailer to his 18-part lecture series, one of The Great Courses, here: https://www.wondrium.com/music-and-th....
Hodges calls her second chapter “Untrainment” reflecting how she’s not been able to get lost in those beats. In chapter three, she introduces us to a classical pianist from Venezuela who’s so in sync with the music she can improvise complicated compositions spontaneously without missing a beat, Gabriela Montero. In awe of her “sixth sense,” Montero calls this phenomenon the “dual implications of helplessness and power.” Power signifying what’s written down in the music for eternity versus the impassioned musician performing with so much spontaneity.
Time, as the title indicates, is examined from many angles starting with the “Prelude,” another clever play on the common term Prologue. “Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.”
It’s not until we reach Chapter four, page 79 (a slender memoir at under 200-pages, with another thirty interesting references), that the memoir and the prose becomes more self-focused, philosophical, and poetic as she looks back on her childhood filled with violin music her mother taught her how to play.
“Uhmma” emigrated from Seoul, South Korea but PLEASE don’t think of the author as the victim of a harsh style of parenting Asian writer Amy Chua brought into modern language in her memoir Hymns to a Tiger Mother. Besides the dangers of labeling and contributing to rising anti-Asian sentiments, nothing could be further from the truth. Hodges loves her mother dearly and appreciates the gift she’s given her (all of her four children play a musical instrument). She reminds us that a characteristic of immigrant families who come to America is wanting “to give your children what you did not have yourself.”
Though she doesn’t dwell on her Texas father’s Asian stereotyping and awful abuse, having gone to South Korea to find himself a subservient wife to start a family in Denver, this is also a story about racism and abuse. How her mother sacrificed so much for her children, counterbalancing the darkness by making sure their home “was music, and music was color.” Music expanded and enriched Hodges’ world immeasurably. That’s not to imply she doesn’t briefly consider whether spending all those formative years practicing might have been wasted time. You can guess how she comes out on that question.
What also makes her memoir so unusual is that while her mother was being violently abused, in addition to the psychic abuse of racism, to the point that her father once hit Uhmma so hard her stitches from a Caesarean delivery “burst,” Hodges felt so much joy growing up in a house of music.
One reason, perhaps, Hodges’ journey doesn’t start off chronologically as commonly done. “Don’t write it like a sob story,” her mother advised. Through her uncommon approach, she hasn’t.
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
In Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, she twists the title with her uncommon memoir, elevating her personal stumbling block to higher ground in the form of scientific and scholarly inquiries in chapters that feel more essayist than memoiristic.
Common measure is a musical term for the most common time signature in which the rhythm of the music beats 1, 2, 3, 4. (See Hodges explain this in an interview.) The concept of common time, she writes, meshes with “communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others.” Part of that idea is that music is a universal language, so when we sit in an auditorium or concert hall we feel in sync with the audience sharing the music’s emotions.
This interpretation relates to the fundamental issue she struggles with: not feeling at one with others she performs with and unable to lose herself in the music along with the audience. Instead, she cannot breakthrough her “self-absorbed, interior time” – her self-consciousness and anxiety that she’ll “mess up” so “nothing flows.”
Although she’s performed on stages in the US, Paris, and Italy attaining technical mastery as a classical violinist, this wasn’t enough to be a solo artist. When you’ve spent practically your whole life practicing and loving the violin and the music, her emotions and professional judgments are profound. Between the beauty of her prose and the beauty of her passion for the music, we feel for her because she’s amazingly disciplined and committed.
Uncommonly too, her purpose comes across as not trying to pull our heartstrings, seeking our sympathy. Rather, as a Harvard trained musicologist she seeks a deeper understanding how the brain connects to music, time, and flow to advance her insight into what keeps happening to her. By writing it down, she’s making sense of her performance anxiety for herself, and then for us to apply to any endeavor, musical or not, which demands intense focus. In the process, she’s also experimenting with her dual interest: a literary life. With this memoir, she’s established herself as an independent and creative thinker with a writing future.
I don’t pretend to understand the science and theories – neuroscience, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics – nor, as a non-musician, the musicology. You don’t have to, and, interestingly, it contributes to why you’re drawn to the writing, marveling at the difficult path she took to try to “break out” of her self-fears and make an extremely difficult and honest decision after devoting twenty years to her artistry since she was a young girl practicing five, six hours a day, eight before a performance.
Hodges lets us into the mind of a perfectionist, intellectually and psychologically. We can’t help but be awed by her ability to play the most complex of musical compositions for the violin, to such a degree that she precisely knows when and where she’ll falter on stage. She’s her worst enemy. Her predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her acute self-awareness overwhelms her ability to rely on “muscle memory” to get into the flow.
The concept of flow first came on the scene in 1990 when Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a word you hear in educational circles describing gifted kids who can focus intensely for hours on end.
Hodges doesn’t cite the “Father of Flow.” Instead, she digs deeper and more specific, introducing us to another psychologist and neuroscientist at Tufts University who’s influenced her thinking, Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel. He uses the cognitive concept of “entrainment” to explain being in sync with music. Defined as “the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat” – not just that we “hear beats” but we “feel beats” – his research has turned “human entrainment into a theory of perception.” You can listen to a trailer to his 18-part lecture series, one of The Great Courses, here: https://www.wondrium.com/music-and-th....
Hodges calls her second chapter “Untrainment” reflecting how she’s not been able to get lost in those beats. In chapter three, she introduces us to a classical pianist from Venezuela who’s so in sync with the music she can improvise complicated compositions spontaneously without missing a beat, Gabriela Montero. In awe of her “sixth sense,” Montero calls this phenomenon the “dual implications of helplessness and power.” Power signifying what’s written down in the music for eternity versus the impassioned musician performing with so much spontaneity.
Time, as the title indicates, is examined from many angles starting with the “Prelude,” another clever play on the common term Prologue. “Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.”
It’s not until we reach Chapter four, page 79 (a slender memoir at under 200-pages, with another thirty interesting references), that the memoir and the prose becomes more self-focused, philosophical, and poetic as she looks back on her childhood filled with violin music her mother taught her how to play.
“Uhmma” emigrated from Seoul, South Korea but PLEASE don’t think of the author as the victim of a harsh style of parenting Asian writer Amy Chua brought into modern language in her memoir Hymns to a Tiger Mother. Besides the dangers of labeling and contributing to rising anti-Asian sentiments, nothing could be further from the truth. Hodges loves her mother dearly and appreciates the gift she’s given her (all of her four children play a musical instrument). She reminds us that a characteristic of immigrant families who come to America is wanting “to give your children what you did not have yourself.”
Though she doesn’t dwell on her Texas father’s Asian stereotyping and awful abuse, having gone to South Korea to find himself a subservient wife to start a family in Denver, this is also a story about racism and abuse. How her mother sacrificed so much for her children, counterbalancing the darkness by making sure their home “was music, and music was color.” Music expanded and enriched Hodges’ world immeasurably. That’s not to imply she doesn’t briefly consider whether spending all those formative years practicing might have been wasted time. You can guess how she comes out on that question.
What also makes her memoir so unusual is that while her mother was being violently abused, in addition to the psychic abuse of racism, to the point that her father once hit Uhmma so hard her stitches from a Caesarean delivery “burst,” Hodges felt so much joy growing up in a house of music.
One reason, perhaps, Hodges’ journey doesn’t start off chronologically as commonly done. “Don’t write it like a sob story,” her mother advised. Through her uncommon approach, she hasn’t.
Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)
June 12, 2022
kind of book that I will definitely re-read again sometime later. I love the way the author combines improvisation in music and its correlation with the passage of time through the perspective of quantum physics. in addition, she also elaborates, on what kind of neural activity is processed when musicians make improvisation whilst playing an instrument, the brain region is being activated, and how that particular improvisation only exists in the present, not to be recreated that somehow feels exclusive to that moment only. apart from that, the author also narrates her journey with playing violin, her performance anxiety, her experience being an Asian in the Western classical music field, about how she had to be twice as good to be considered half as much. she was in despair of wanting to quit playing violin but how could it be possible if violin was all she ever known all her life? that violin had forged her identity, and was the extension of her mother's vanished dream.
the way she writes is both poignant and beautiful. her journey felt so raw that I felt like an intruder peeking into someone else's life and somehow got so invested that whenever she faced certain obstacles, I, too shared the misery. to conclude, I was entranced by how a book that consists not over 150 pages could contain so much. lovely <3
"Improvisation may serve as a metaphor of time in the quantum universe, where reality and possibility exist simultaneously and where past, present, and future are one. Even though on the level of concrete, lived experience time seems to slip away, to vanish, without the possibility of return,"
the way she writes is both poignant and beautiful. her journey felt so raw that I felt like an intruder peeking into someone else's life and somehow got so invested that whenever she faced certain obstacles, I, too shared the misery. to conclude, I was entranced by how a book that consists not over 150 pages could contain so much. lovely <3
"Improvisation may serve as a metaphor of time in the quantum universe, where reality and possibility exist simultaneously and where past, present, and future are one. Even though on the level of concrete, lived experience time seems to slip away, to vanish, without the possibility of return,"
January 29, 2024
4.5 rounded up. Though I found some sections in the first half of the book, particularly those where the writer describes her emotions in regards to music, contrived and awkward, the book on a whole was fascinating! I learned so much about music, science, and even Asian tiger moms/model minority - a topic which I thought I already knew well! This was beautifully executed and even more informative/endearing in a way I did not expect at all.
July 3, 2022
This book was thought-provoking and beautifully written. I expected it to be some kind of nerdy memoir, but it was more of a collection of loosely-connected personal essays. I wish there had been more of them, as I was finished disappointingly soon.
August 11, 2022
“The section is one long crescendo toward ecstasy, full of open strings, where you don’t put any fingers down and just bow, letting the strings ring out in their full and elemental clarity. Violinistically, it’s a delight to play: The open strings set your entire violin trembling, so that you can feel the wood itself ringing against your neck and shoulder as you bow and then increase in their resonance and warmth, until the notes are ringing out with a joy that defies all containment, a bright effusion, a shout from the mountaintops. You can’t help but feel some sacred presence, there, in the midst of grief; the music continues building and rising until it can no longer contain itself, and you feel the light that is spilling forth, the joy of being delivered from yourself.”
“Every human culture,” Patel writes, “has some form of music with a beat: a perceived periodic pulse that structures the perception of musical rhythm and which serves as a framework for synchronized movement to music.” In other words, humans don’t just hear beats—we feel beats, internalizing them in our bodies and using our bodies to express their time. Even monkeys have a difficult time learning to tap in sync with a metronome, “a task which is trivially easy for humans, even for those with no musical training.”
Bravissimo to this gorgeous book, it is a work of art and heart. It continues the immigration theme of my recent books, and adds music, which I love. I want to cry every time I hear Leonard Cohen sing in Hallelujah: you don’t really care for music, do you? Music is such a endless comfort and stimulation and thought provoking art; if there was one moment in time I wish I had been there for, it was when we started to know we could sing. It may have predated language, babies can hum and vocalize before words. And they learn best when lessons are put to song, and new research is wondering if we are who we are as humans due to music. I buy it.
The author is a biracial Korean American with trauma in her past and a talent for violin that was beyond ordinary, but her performance anxiety superseded the talent. Her translation or interpretation of what a musician can feel is stunning. I can’t quite say I felt the same with my meager talent and experience with the flute and piccolo as a teen, but there were a few times I felt the edges of what she writes, and those edges are/were sublime. She could have just written that and the book would be amazing, but she delves into physics and philosophy or time and it’s lovely. Another writer to watch…
She references the amazing Venezuelan pianist and activist Gabriela Montero who has a supernatural improvisation talent and her concerts are amazing, check her out…. https://youtu.be/fkXG-2LukrE
“Time renders most individual moments meaningless… but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux….I wonder what that means, exactly: for time to live in us. It’s a feeling I have whenever I am playing well—not just getting the notes but really playing just the way I want, or sometimes even when I am simply listening to music—one I cannot shake.
Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form. We feel that embodiment whenever we witness an orchestra’s collective sway and sigh to the movement of a baton, or measure a long car ride by the playlist of songs we’ve run through; every time we feel moved by music to dance; when we find, as we begin dancing, that we know intuitively how to take the rhythm into our bodies, that we are somehow sure of when and how the next beat will fall. Surely, I thought, there must be a scientific reason behind that innately human sense of embodied time, a way of grounding our musical intuition in physics and biology, if not completely quantifying it.
Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events. Rhythm is at the heart of that arrangement, on every scale: the cycling and patterning of repeated sound or movement and the “measured flow” that that repetition creates. The most fundamental rhythm is the beat itself, the pulse that occurs at regular intervals and thus dictates the tempo, keeps musical time. In music, a beat is no fixed thing — it can quicken into smaller intervals (accelerando) and stretch out into longer ones (decelerando), depending on the character of a given musical moment and the feeling or fancy of the performer — but it does remain periodic, predictable, inexorable. Even at the level of pitch, which is really the speed of a given sound wave’s oscillation, we are really hearing the rhythmic demarcation of time, a tiny heart whirring at a beat of x cycles per second.
Thus moments of musical time are connected, in our minds, by our uncanny predictive sense of when the next beat will fall, of what the next chord could be. But what is that sense, exactly? Turns out there’s a word for it, and neurological research behind it: entrainment, the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat, “a perceived periodic pulse that listeners use to guide their movements and performers use to coordinate their actions.”
Here’s the thing that I don’t understand: In improvisation, the generation of material is spontaneous, but it’s never random. This in itself constitutes a paradox: If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing—on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it—except chance? In other words, how can the spontaneous be anything but random; how can music made in a jolt of instinct, on a bolt out of the now, be endowed with a form that makes sense in time, as though it had been written and rewritten and practiced and memorized beforehand?
During the scale and memory trials, these areas of Venezuelan pianist lGabriela Montero’s brain lit up with interconnectivity, as though her senses of time and space and memory were all talking to one another, working together to re-create these tasks that, together, they had been preprogrammed to execute. But each time the researchers asked Montero to switch to improvisation, the light of that interconnectivity was suddenly, substantially dimmed. (In more technical terms, the interactions between those various regions were significantly and quantifiably reduced.) The Montero study corroborates previous analyses of improvising brains, mainly those of jazz performers, which found that the “decreased self-awareness and feelings of control” that constitute a flow state are “associated with decreased activity within regions of the default-mode network.” I think the phenomenon they describe has visited most of us at some point in our lives: the feeling of easy self-suspension that in the best moments can accompany deep focus, the way that when you have to throw yourself into a task it becomes almost a way to abandon the self, almost a relief to leave the self behind.
Montero’s, then, is a transcendent kind of muscle memory—not one to which her musicality is bound, but, rather, which she bends to her whim and will, memory that opens up an infinity of possibilities in the present.
Improvisation, then, can be seen as an uncanny manifestation of deep memory itself: the creation of order out of disorder, a deep up-pouring from some dormant part of the soul; a confirmation that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows.”
It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you are the flow itself. I suppose at the heart of that feeling, too, lies the real trouble with time: the terrifying prospect that if time is so subjective, then we are necessarily alone in our unique experience of it. But isn’t it because time lives in us that we can shape it, sculpt it into phrases and cadences and giros and ochos; still it if not stop it, bend it if not vanquish it. And share it.
Implicit in time’s asymmetry, then, is the notion of becoming. The universe unspools itself toward a state of higher entropy; its edges fray, its dust is swept into corners, and this process of degradation and erosion is what separates the future from the past. We think of “becoming” as moving toward something final, evolving into a more perfect and more stable state over time. Yet, by proceeding forward in time, that very process must involve itself in the increasing disorder of the universe. When we seek to become something or someone else, to change our lives and leave the past behind, we necessarily abandon ourselves to entropy: We scatter old pieces of ourselves, willfully smudge our edges and make a mess of things, strive to break free of old symmetries that we feel can no longer contain us. Or, perhaps, that very instinct to change ourselves is a kind of preemptive embrace of the chaos we know is to come, a sign that we have already begun to spin out of control, that time is passing and taking us along with it and that soon nothing will be as it once was.
Is assimilation, then, the preservation of a symmetry or its breaking? On one hand, moving across the world in order to begin life anew necessitates undergoing a monumental translation in space and language and time, a transcontinental shift from there to here, then to now. You are required to change yourself, to break symmetry with the past and with the person you used to be; in many cases, perhaps, the desire for such a break motivates immigration itself.
The variations abide by slightly different chord progressions but retain the same circular shape; each ends the way it began, with a D minor sonority, leading seamlessly into the next variation in a perfect ellipse of end and beginning. They take the form not of linear stages but iterative, circular variations, different feelings and memories buried within one another. Within each circle is contained a world of memory and sorrow, as though the moment has opened wide, the waves of time expanded, their oscillation slowed….
Mateo played the first bars, a slow, breathing succession of chords, rolling them delicately as though on a mandolin. They were so beautiful that I was taken out of my thoughts and instead began hearing, in my head, how the violin part would sound in counterpoint to his playing. When someone plays with that kind of deep feeling, it’s almost impossible not to play toward that person, not to send your sound out so that it rises to meet theirs.
“Every human culture,” Patel writes, “has some form of music with a beat: a perceived periodic pulse that structures the perception of musical rhythm and which serves as a framework for synchronized movement to music.” In other words, humans don’t just hear beats—we feel beats, internalizing them in our bodies and using our bodies to express their time. Even monkeys have a difficult time learning to tap in sync with a metronome, “a task which is trivially easy for humans, even for those with no musical training.”
Bravissimo to this gorgeous book, it is a work of art and heart. It continues the immigration theme of my recent books, and adds music, which I love. I want to cry every time I hear Leonard Cohen sing in Hallelujah: you don’t really care for music, do you? Music is such a endless comfort and stimulation and thought provoking art; if there was one moment in time I wish I had been there for, it was when we started to know we could sing. It may have predated language, babies can hum and vocalize before words. And they learn best when lessons are put to song, and new research is wondering if we are who we are as humans due to music. I buy it.
The author is a biracial Korean American with trauma in her past and a talent for violin that was beyond ordinary, but her performance anxiety superseded the talent. Her translation or interpretation of what a musician can feel is stunning. I can’t quite say I felt the same with my meager talent and experience with the flute and piccolo as a teen, but there were a few times I felt the edges of what she writes, and those edges are/were sublime. She could have just written that and the book would be amazing, but she delves into physics and philosophy or time and it’s lovely. Another writer to watch…
She references the amazing Venezuelan pianist and activist Gabriela Montero who has a supernatural improvisation talent and her concerts are amazing, check her out…. https://youtu.be/fkXG-2LukrE
“Time renders most individual moments meaningless… but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux….I wonder what that means, exactly: for time to live in us. It’s a feeling I have whenever I am playing well—not just getting the notes but really playing just the way I want, or sometimes even when I am simply listening to music—one I cannot shake.
Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form. We feel that embodiment whenever we witness an orchestra’s collective sway and sigh to the movement of a baton, or measure a long car ride by the playlist of songs we’ve run through; every time we feel moved by music to dance; when we find, as we begin dancing, that we know intuitively how to take the rhythm into our bodies, that we are somehow sure of when and how the next beat will fall. Surely, I thought, there must be a scientific reason behind that innately human sense of embodied time, a way of grounding our musical intuition in physics and biology, if not completely quantifying it.
Music sculpts time. Indeed, it is a structuring of time, as a layered arrangement of audible temporal events. Rhythm is at the heart of that arrangement, on every scale: the cycling and patterning of repeated sound or movement and the “measured flow” that that repetition creates. The most fundamental rhythm is the beat itself, the pulse that occurs at regular intervals and thus dictates the tempo, keeps musical time. In music, a beat is no fixed thing — it can quicken into smaller intervals (accelerando) and stretch out into longer ones (decelerando), depending on the character of a given musical moment and the feeling or fancy of the performer — but it does remain periodic, predictable, inexorable. Even at the level of pitch, which is really the speed of a given sound wave’s oscillation, we are really hearing the rhythmic demarcation of time, a tiny heart whirring at a beat of x cycles per second.
Thus moments of musical time are connected, in our minds, by our uncanny predictive sense of when the next beat will fall, of what the next chord could be. But what is that sense, exactly? Turns out there’s a word for it, and neurological research behind it: entrainment, the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat, “a perceived periodic pulse that listeners use to guide their movements and performers use to coordinate their actions.”
Here’s the thing that I don’t understand: In improvisation, the generation of material is spontaneous, but it’s never random. This in itself constitutes a paradox: If you can choose to play anything, with equal probability, what could make you choose any one thing—on the spur of the moment, blindly, trusting, without thinking about it—except chance? In other words, how can the spontaneous be anything but random; how can music made in a jolt of instinct, on a bolt out of the now, be endowed with a form that makes sense in time, as though it had been written and rewritten and practiced and memorized beforehand?
During the scale and memory trials, these areas of Venezuelan pianist lGabriela Montero’s brain lit up with interconnectivity, as though her senses of time and space and memory were all talking to one another, working together to re-create these tasks that, together, they had been preprogrammed to execute. But each time the researchers asked Montero to switch to improvisation, the light of that interconnectivity was suddenly, substantially dimmed. (In more technical terms, the interactions between those various regions were significantly and quantifiably reduced.) The Montero study corroborates previous analyses of improvising brains, mainly those of jazz performers, which found that the “decreased self-awareness and feelings of control” that constitute a flow state are “associated with decreased activity within regions of the default-mode network.” I think the phenomenon they describe has visited most of us at some point in our lives: the feeling of easy self-suspension that in the best moments can accompany deep focus, the way that when you have to throw yourself into a task it becomes almost a way to abandon the self, almost a relief to leave the self behind.
Montero’s, then, is a transcendent kind of muscle memory—not one to which her musicality is bound, but, rather, which she bends to her whim and will, memory that opens up an infinity of possibilities in the present.
Improvisation, then, can be seen as an uncanny manifestation of deep memory itself: the creation of order out of disorder, a deep up-pouring from some dormant part of the soul; a confirmation that “the mind knows things it does not know it knows.”
It’s a strange feeling, beautiful but also eerie: not only that you can step into time’s flow, but that you are the flow itself. I suppose at the heart of that feeling, too, lies the real trouble with time: the terrifying prospect that if time is so subjective, then we are necessarily alone in our unique experience of it. But isn’t it because time lives in us that we can shape it, sculpt it into phrases and cadences and giros and ochos; still it if not stop it, bend it if not vanquish it. And share it.
Implicit in time’s asymmetry, then, is the notion of becoming. The universe unspools itself toward a state of higher entropy; its edges fray, its dust is swept into corners, and this process of degradation and erosion is what separates the future from the past. We think of “becoming” as moving toward something final, evolving into a more perfect and more stable state over time. Yet, by proceeding forward in time, that very process must involve itself in the increasing disorder of the universe. When we seek to become something or someone else, to change our lives and leave the past behind, we necessarily abandon ourselves to entropy: We scatter old pieces of ourselves, willfully smudge our edges and make a mess of things, strive to break free of old symmetries that we feel can no longer contain us. Or, perhaps, that very instinct to change ourselves is a kind of preemptive embrace of the chaos we know is to come, a sign that we have already begun to spin out of control, that time is passing and taking us along with it and that soon nothing will be as it once was.
Is assimilation, then, the preservation of a symmetry or its breaking? On one hand, moving across the world in order to begin life anew necessitates undergoing a monumental translation in space and language and time, a transcontinental shift from there to here, then to now. You are required to change yourself, to break symmetry with the past and with the person you used to be; in many cases, perhaps, the desire for such a break motivates immigration itself.
The variations abide by slightly different chord progressions but retain the same circular shape; each ends the way it began, with a D minor sonority, leading seamlessly into the next variation in a perfect ellipse of end and beginning. They take the form not of linear stages but iterative, circular variations, different feelings and memories buried within one another. Within each circle is contained a world of memory and sorrow, as though the moment has opened wide, the waves of time expanded, their oscillation slowed….
Mateo played the first bars, a slow, breathing succession of chords, rolling them delicately as though on a mandolin. They were so beautiful that I was taken out of my thoughts and instead began hearing, in my head, how the violin part would sound in counterpoint to his playing. When someone plays with that kind of deep feeling, it’s almost impossible not to play toward that person, not to send your sound out so that it rises to meet theirs.
February 25, 2023
Hodges seamlessly weaves together three separate but simultaneous narratives of time; that of human memory, music, and the phenomena of the quantum world. Her written explorations into Bach's Chaconne, quantum entanglement, and her mothers loving dedication resemble the musical harmonies, chord progressions, and variations that become central themes in her writing. Overlapping, resonating, and glowing with a humble profundity, Hodges was meant to write this book.
January 29, 2024
This was excellent. If Hodges is anywhere near as talented a violinist as she is a writer, then she must be amazing. The chapter on Bach's Chaconne was particularly poignant and well-written.
April 9, 2022
Natalie Hodges writes a beautiful narrative that moves the readers through the landscape of her life. She is reflective in her pursuits of music as a violinist and the challenges of family and performance expectations. With all this, she mixes her story with a wonderful array of perspectives, involving the nature of time, psychology , quantum physics, neurology and biology. It was a pleasure to read and it has added much to my understanding of music and it's multifaceted connections. I highly recommend this fine work!
November 2, 2022
Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (2022), by Natalie Hodges is marvelous. I find myself, several days after having finished reading it, still enthralled in a knowledge-filled afterglow of thought. The book is part science exploration, part personal memoir, part discourse on the musician's milieu in an insightful book. It is a noteworthy, shelf-worthy study guide. Ms. Hodges "yokes" many ideas together. She writes, "[W]riting about time and music...opened up to me a world of scientific research that I had never known: in order to write credibly, I had to dig into the physics metaphors and biological responses that connect music temporality to something larger and more fundamental about the human experience." And she does. In my opinion, in the best of worlds, the bonded pair of writer and the reader traverse time; each come to know self and other through the processes of study and communication.
The reader will enjoy clear writing that comes across almost poetically in places. The message of the book is a sostenuto that crescendos throughout as pieces of thought come to light. Can it be not surprising that a musician nee writer would achieve such wonderful "entanglement" communicating with audiences? Of course, it takes two to "tango:" that dance being a subject about which a chapter is devoted and alone worth the time and cost of the book invested to enjoy it. I tracked down and listened to all the pieces of music mentioned in the book - an activity that added greatly to my appreciating Ms. Hodges' points.
I compliment Ms. Hodges and her editors and advisors regarding the use and usefulness of the book's Acknowledgements, Credits, Notes, and Bibliography sections. These sections are truly welcomed "wormholes" in their own right, through which the reader might become additionally connected to other source-filled worlds of ideas and knowledge. The inclusion of these thoughtful parts bring forth a value far beyond mere marks on a printed page.
This book is special. If you're interested in basic science theories pertaining to time and matter, if you are interested in the measure of effort it takes to live by values and standards (both imposed from without and within) in order to self-actualize and live a life connected with others (who doesn't), if you want a peek into a musician's life, if you want to a sense of the struggle inherent in being a woman who is part of a social minority, or if you're either a teacher or a learner: READ THIS BOOK. You'll be smarter for it. Here a few quotes:
Ms. Hodges wrote:
In the act of recording, writing, remembering, our stories onto a particular path - one way, perhaps, that from our limited human perspective we can come to terms with the infinity of past paths not taken. / 14
Music sculpts time. / 24
There's a term for that interplay of stretch and compression: rubato, literally the "robbing of time." / 27
[T]he ability to make and appreciate music offered our ancestors more than just what Steven Pinker has called "auditory cheesecake": a real biological advantage that increased their chances of survival. The uncanny ability to entrain one's own body to a beat translates into the equally uncanny ability to synk one's movement with the movement of others... a cross-cultural or "universal" purpose of music was to synchronize group actions, because a bonded, cooperative group - on the hunt or on the move, learning to fight and gather and build in tandem - was more likely to out compete a discombobulated one. / 40
The desire to make music is as much a desire to assert the individual self as to connect with others. / 40
Performance requires humility: your willingness to risk being humiliated or misunderstood, and to lay yourself bare so you can try to say what you mean (and what you think the composer meant). That is what is at the stake and performance: nothing more or less than the longing for self-expression, to connect with others and be heard by them. / 40
The drug of improvisation, like drugs of altered consciousness, seems to open up associative pathways along which the self is given permission to disintegrate, to give in to the pool of disorder and it's accompanying freedoms. / 74
To create is indeed to remember; to remember is to involve oneself in a universe of feeling, to fold time in on itself until it can contain itself no longer. / 77-78
[Bach] signed all of his religious compositions, approximately a thousand of them, "SDG": Soli Deo gloria, "to God alone the glory." The way God is glorified through prayer - not by words of worship only, but by the very act of kneeling before Him - that's how Bach wrote. He removed his ego from his music so that he might make of that music a worthy offering.
This deep humility...manifests itself, musically, as a preoccupation with structure and form rather than overt expressivity. Bach wrote most of his compositions in counterpoint - that is, with a multiplicity of simultaneous independent lines, so that no one voice is privileged too long over the others. Instead, they are constantly in argument and dialogue. Instead, they are constantly in argument and dialogue...Bach strips away the ego of both composer and performer, with all its defenses and desires, in order to lay bare pure feeling: a sin confessed after a long silence, a head bowed in prayer. / 126
The section is one long crescendo toward ecstasy, full of open strings, where you don't put any fingers down and just bow, letting the strings ring out in their full and elemental clarity. Violinistically, it's [Bach's Chaconne] is a delight to play: the open strings set your entire violin trembling, so that you can feel the wood itself ringing against your neck and shoulder as you bow..Bach adds another iterated element, a trinity of repeated notes - either A or D - that sound like the striking of a bell. They create a kind of ellipse between the end of each phrase and the beginning of the next, linking and extending them into one continuous moment; they are alpha and omega, beginning and end, and their persistent chiming announces, over and over again, the present moment.. You can't help but feel some sacred presence, there, in the midst of grief; the music continues building and rising until it can no longer contain itself. And you feel the light that is a spilling forth, the joy of being delivered from yourself. With each iteration the feeling grows stronger, the conviction deeper, the present moment freer of the past. / 138 - 139
"At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still
Point, there the dance is..."
- T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" /141
The only way to keep the dance flowing in time is for each partner to intuit how the other will move, even if you don't know exactly what you are intuiting: communion without direct communication, intimacy without knowledge; the simultaneous leaping of entangled minds. / 152
Tango itself begins, then, with something as momentary and fateful as attraction, as coincidental and yet certain as chemistry. The dance itself is as much a product of that connection as the connection is of the dance. / 153
[In the tango the] "dominant emotion is nostalgia, a sense of loss," of a past that continually haunts the present... For [Ms. Hodges' dance instructor] Thomas, that sadness strengthens the connection between performers and draws the audience into their aura. "There's something that's extremely powerful about that, and about sharing one's sadness with one's dance partner...And I think that's part of the profound emotional connection in the dance...And the fact that you can have such an emotional intimacy with someone you're just meeting for the first time and not even talking to, and embracing in a very close embrace, where you're touching at the chest, at the cheek, at the forehead, perhaps, and you're sharing really deep feelings that connect you to your partner add to the music, I think that's why it's such a profound emotional experience." / 154
But for me, writing is a way of continuing to be a musician, and of growing as a musician, because without music I don't think I would have anything to write about, or at least anything worthwhile to say. And writing about time and music, and particular, opened up to me a world of scientific research that I had never known: in order to write credibly, I had to dig into the physics metaphors and biological responses that connect music temporality to something larger and more fundamental about the human experience. Time, or at least our perception of its passage, is too complicated a subject to examine from either a humanistic or a scientific angle alone. Each needs the other, points inevitably toward the other. / 174
For me personally, the book is meant to be a hologram of sorts, too: for all my memories of this thing I loved, that I will both always have and can never have again. / 178
The reader will enjoy clear writing that comes across almost poetically in places. The message of the book is a sostenuto that crescendos throughout as pieces of thought come to light. Can it be not surprising that a musician nee writer would achieve such wonderful "entanglement" communicating with audiences? Of course, it takes two to "tango:" that dance being a subject about which a chapter is devoted and alone worth the time and cost of the book invested to enjoy it. I tracked down and listened to all the pieces of music mentioned in the book - an activity that added greatly to my appreciating Ms. Hodges' points.
I compliment Ms. Hodges and her editors and advisors regarding the use and usefulness of the book's Acknowledgements, Credits, Notes, and Bibliography sections. These sections are truly welcomed "wormholes" in their own right, through which the reader might become additionally connected to other source-filled worlds of ideas and knowledge. The inclusion of these thoughtful parts bring forth a value far beyond mere marks on a printed page.
This book is special. If you're interested in basic science theories pertaining to time and matter, if you are interested in the measure of effort it takes to live by values and standards (both imposed from without and within) in order to self-actualize and live a life connected with others (who doesn't), if you want a peek into a musician's life, if you want to a sense of the struggle inherent in being a woman who is part of a social minority, or if you're either a teacher or a learner: READ THIS BOOK. You'll be smarter for it. Here a few quotes:
Ms. Hodges wrote:
In the act of recording, writing, remembering, our stories onto a particular path - one way, perhaps, that from our limited human perspective we can come to terms with the infinity of past paths not taken. / 14
Music sculpts time. / 24
There's a term for that interplay of stretch and compression: rubato, literally the "robbing of time." / 27
[T]he ability to make and appreciate music offered our ancestors more than just what Steven Pinker has called "auditory cheesecake": a real biological advantage that increased their chances of survival. The uncanny ability to entrain one's own body to a beat translates into the equally uncanny ability to synk one's movement with the movement of others... a cross-cultural or "universal" purpose of music was to synchronize group actions, because a bonded, cooperative group - on the hunt or on the move, learning to fight and gather and build in tandem - was more likely to out compete a discombobulated one. / 40
The desire to make music is as much a desire to assert the individual self as to connect with others. / 40
Performance requires humility: your willingness to risk being humiliated or misunderstood, and to lay yourself bare so you can try to say what you mean (and what you think the composer meant). That is what is at the stake and performance: nothing more or less than the longing for self-expression, to connect with others and be heard by them. / 40
The drug of improvisation, like drugs of altered consciousness, seems to open up associative pathways along which the self is given permission to disintegrate, to give in to the pool of disorder and it's accompanying freedoms. / 74
To create is indeed to remember; to remember is to involve oneself in a universe of feeling, to fold time in on itself until it can contain itself no longer. / 77-78
[Bach] signed all of his religious compositions, approximately a thousand of them, "SDG": Soli Deo gloria, "to God alone the glory." The way God is glorified through prayer - not by words of worship only, but by the very act of kneeling before Him - that's how Bach wrote. He removed his ego from his music so that he might make of that music a worthy offering.
This deep humility...manifests itself, musically, as a preoccupation with structure and form rather than overt expressivity. Bach wrote most of his compositions in counterpoint - that is, with a multiplicity of simultaneous independent lines, so that no one voice is privileged too long over the others. Instead, they are constantly in argument and dialogue. Instead, they are constantly in argument and dialogue...Bach strips away the ego of both composer and performer, with all its defenses and desires, in order to lay bare pure feeling: a sin confessed after a long silence, a head bowed in prayer. / 126
The section is one long crescendo toward ecstasy, full of open strings, where you don't put any fingers down and just bow, letting the strings ring out in their full and elemental clarity. Violinistically, it's [Bach's Chaconne] is a delight to play: the open strings set your entire violin trembling, so that you can feel the wood itself ringing against your neck and shoulder as you bow..Bach adds another iterated element, a trinity of repeated notes - either A or D - that sound like the striking of a bell. They create a kind of ellipse between the end of each phrase and the beginning of the next, linking and extending them into one continuous moment; they are alpha and omega, beginning and end, and their persistent chiming announces, over and over again, the present moment.. You can't help but feel some sacred presence, there, in the midst of grief; the music continues building and rising until it can no longer contain itself. And you feel the light that is a spilling forth, the joy of being delivered from yourself. With each iteration the feeling grows stronger, the conviction deeper, the present moment freer of the past. / 138 - 139
"At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still
Point, there the dance is..."
- T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" /141
The only way to keep the dance flowing in time is for each partner to intuit how the other will move, even if you don't know exactly what you are intuiting: communion without direct communication, intimacy without knowledge; the simultaneous leaping of entangled minds. / 152
Tango itself begins, then, with something as momentary and fateful as attraction, as coincidental and yet certain as chemistry. The dance itself is as much a product of that connection as the connection is of the dance. / 153
[In the tango the] "dominant emotion is nostalgia, a sense of loss," of a past that continually haunts the present... For [Ms. Hodges' dance instructor] Thomas, that sadness strengthens the connection between performers and draws the audience into their aura. "There's something that's extremely powerful about that, and about sharing one's sadness with one's dance partner...And I think that's part of the profound emotional connection in the dance...And the fact that you can have such an emotional intimacy with someone you're just meeting for the first time and not even talking to, and embracing in a very close embrace, where you're touching at the chest, at the cheek, at the forehead, perhaps, and you're sharing really deep feelings that connect you to your partner add to the music, I think that's why it's such a profound emotional experience." / 154
But for me, writing is a way of continuing to be a musician, and of growing as a musician, because without music I don't think I would have anything to write about, or at least anything worthwhile to say. And writing about time and music, and particular, opened up to me a world of scientific research that I had never known: in order to write credibly, I had to dig into the physics metaphors and biological responses that connect music temporality to something larger and more fundamental about the human experience. Time, or at least our perception of its passage, is too complicated a subject to examine from either a humanistic or a scientific angle alone. Each needs the other, points inevitably toward the other. / 174
For me personally, the book is meant to be a hologram of sorts, too: for all my memories of this thing I loved, that I will both always have and can never have again. / 178
March 31, 2022
I probably should not have selected this book from the Early Reviewer list. This book is a memoir, but is not easily read by a non-musician such as myself. I think it would be much more appreciated by musicians, philosopers, and/or scientists. Frankly, it was just beyond me. Much of the vocabulary was either too highly specialized or quite nebulous, an odd combination. Chalk it up to a mismatch between me and this book.
May 2, 2022
Brilliant and moving on the nexus of talent v passion v work — and the chapter on Bach’s Chaconne has had me seeking out every version I can find.
November 1, 2022
That chapter on the Bach Chaconne was a humdinger. Highly recommended for live performers.
April 3, 2022
This is a new book that I just heard of last week. The author is a young violinist and the book is a an extended essay/memoir about her experience of time in relation to her experience of music, but in practice and performance. The book is actually a series of essays related to her upbringing as a second generation Korean-American immigrant and its sections/chapters touch on her interrelated tensions of crafting an identity out of her personal, musical, educational, and social experiences. This is a deep and thoughtful book that touches on a range of issues and I will not try to summarize them here.
Ms. Hodges writes from the perspective of someone who has practiced five or more hours a day for years with the intent of becoming a top concert violinist, but has recently concluded that she will not attain this goal and thus needs to reorient her thinking to other areas besides learning the violin, even though she enjoys the music immensely. I sympathize with this perspective a little but must also add that readers can watch and listen to Mx. Hodges play on a video clips that is easy to find online. She plays very well and it is difficult to imagine her dropping it with all that she has learned. I started reading her book on my trip downtown to see Hilary Hahn perform some chamber music at the CSO. Anyone who follows this music will know that there is only a relative handful of top soloists who play classical violin professionally. It is hardly anything resembling a life failure to not make that club.
Along with this line of thought, Ms. Hodges also discusses the cognitive and biological aspects of musical performance. What is involved in performing? In performing well? In having mental blockages that impair performance? What is the difference between working from scripts and improvising? Why is it different to perform in front of an audience rather than performing without an audience? This is interesting and insightful writing that has implications for other sorts of performance activities such as acting or public speaking. Similar issues come up in a later chapter on dancing the Tango.
No young person’s memoir would be complete without some reflection on the role of parents. This is not what most interested me in the book, although Ms. Hodges’s discussion of stereotypes of Asians playing classical music and the importance of “Tiger Moms” in pushing kids to succeed was interesting. The stereotypes are still tossed around but I know few people who give them much credence. I thought the “Tiger Mom” book was overdone when it was introduced and I am sympathetic to the Mother in this story (as is Ms. Hodges).
This is a wonderful and thoughtful. Ms. Hodges writes well. The book reads like it also benefitted from some good editing. I hope she writes more books.
Ms. Hodges writes from the perspective of someone who has practiced five or more hours a day for years with the intent of becoming a top concert violinist, but has recently concluded that she will not attain this goal and thus needs to reorient her thinking to other areas besides learning the violin, even though she enjoys the music immensely. I sympathize with this perspective a little but must also add that readers can watch and listen to Mx. Hodges play on a video clips that is easy to find online. She plays very well and it is difficult to imagine her dropping it with all that she has learned. I started reading her book on my trip downtown to see Hilary Hahn perform some chamber music at the CSO. Anyone who follows this music will know that there is only a relative handful of top soloists who play classical violin professionally. It is hardly anything resembling a life failure to not make that club.
Along with this line of thought, Ms. Hodges also discusses the cognitive and biological aspects of musical performance. What is involved in performing? In performing well? In having mental blockages that impair performance? What is the difference between working from scripts and improvising? Why is it different to perform in front of an audience rather than performing without an audience? This is interesting and insightful writing that has implications for other sorts of performance activities such as acting or public speaking. Similar issues come up in a later chapter on dancing the Tango.
No young person’s memoir would be complete without some reflection on the role of parents. This is not what most interested me in the book, although Ms. Hodges’s discussion of stereotypes of Asians playing classical music and the importance of “Tiger Moms” in pushing kids to succeed was interesting. The stereotypes are still tossed around but I know few people who give them much credence. I thought the “Tiger Mom” book was overdone when it was introduced and I am sympathetic to the Mother in this story (as is Ms. Hodges).
This is a wonderful and thoughtful. Ms. Hodges writes well. The book reads like it also benefitted from some good editing. I hope she writes more books.
September 12, 2022
I am/was a musician myself. In fact, I was in youth orchestra with the author of this book many years ago, and what a pleasure it has been to read her writings and revisit that time of my life, from the perspective of a much older me.
It is an admirable thing in itself to write and publish a book, more admirable still to put out a work so personal and vulnerable, and most admirable of all to create such a thoughtful and mature collection of pieces at such a young age. Hodges not only attempts (and succeeds, in my view) to balance that tricky crossover between many disciplines: music, personal history, philosophy, science, etc., but she is also able to weave it all together via intelligent, thoughtful self-exploration and reflection. Perhaps the complicated mix of sorrow and joy she equates with her relationship to music, as she examines in these essays, is specific only to musicians; perhaps it can be found in all areas to which we humans devote hours of our time and energy but maybe do not succeed in the way that we wish. As a musician myself who dedicated many hours to the discipline and who has since let much of it go, I find many of my sentiments reflected beautifully in Hodges' experiences here. I am impressed with how masterfully she is able to put into words the complexities that inhabit (and inhibit) the world of classical music, particularly from the view of a striving young person.
From her Notes on Improvisation, where she (bravely) opens up about how difficult it can be for a perfectionist, classically-trained player to enter the world outside the rigidity of sheet-music, to the heartbreaking recognition of her mother's never-ending dedication to her childrens' success; from a deep-dive into Bach's Chaconne as representation of the violinist's daunting (and discouraging) task in life, to an exploration of the tango as an embodiment of the intense connection between human bodies and souls, it is all a captivating read. I find the connections between physics and the topics herein particularly fascinating; as much of a non-physicist as I am, I was able to follow and wonder along with the author as she pursues many new and thought-provoking threads. My only complaint, in fact (if it be a complaint) is the undercurrent of low self-esteem I see throughout, as the author occasionally alludes to her "failures" from the violin practice room to the tango floor. How sad to see the attitude of self-abasement that plagues the (albeit exceptionally-talented) young person who can still never be good enough. I merely say, brava to this young author! May she publish more in future, and I hope she can see her own successes, even as she sets down her violin for other pursuits.
It is an admirable thing in itself to write and publish a book, more admirable still to put out a work so personal and vulnerable, and most admirable of all to create such a thoughtful and mature collection of pieces at such a young age. Hodges not only attempts (and succeeds, in my view) to balance that tricky crossover between many disciplines: music, personal history, philosophy, science, etc., but she is also able to weave it all together via intelligent, thoughtful self-exploration and reflection. Perhaps the complicated mix of sorrow and joy she equates with her relationship to music, as she examines in these essays, is specific only to musicians; perhaps it can be found in all areas to which we humans devote hours of our time and energy but maybe do not succeed in the way that we wish. As a musician myself who dedicated many hours to the discipline and who has since let much of it go, I find many of my sentiments reflected beautifully in Hodges' experiences here. I am impressed with how masterfully she is able to put into words the complexities that inhabit (and inhibit) the world of classical music, particularly from the view of a striving young person.
From her Notes on Improvisation, where she (bravely) opens up about how difficult it can be for a perfectionist, classically-trained player to enter the world outside the rigidity of sheet-music, to the heartbreaking recognition of her mother's never-ending dedication to her childrens' success; from a deep-dive into Bach's Chaconne as representation of the violinist's daunting (and discouraging) task in life, to an exploration of the tango as an embodiment of the intense connection between human bodies and souls, it is all a captivating read. I find the connections between physics and the topics herein particularly fascinating; as much of a non-physicist as I am, I was able to follow and wonder along with the author as she pursues many new and thought-provoking threads. My only complaint, in fact (if it be a complaint) is the undercurrent of low self-esteem I see throughout, as the author occasionally alludes to her "failures" from the violin practice room to the tango floor. How sad to see the attitude of self-abasement that plagues the (albeit exceptionally-talented) young person who can still never be good enough. I merely say, brava to this young author! May she publish more in future, and I hope she can see her own successes, even as she sets down her violin for other pursuits.
September 21, 2023
This book was a gift to me, and I was interested to read it, but I ended up DNF'ing it out of frustration. Natalie Hodges writes about music very well, but it's clear to me that she hasn't recovered from her issues of perfectionism brought on by strict classical training.
As an example, early in the book she describes how she failed to give a perfect performance of an incredibly difficult piece of repertoire as a young student, and she describes it as the most traumatic event of her life and the reason she quits classical music. As a classically trained musician, I know that music school places extreme burdens and expectations on very young students, but I also understand that trying (and failing) is part of the process. Becoming a virtuoso in any instrument takes many decades of persistent and directed training as well as emotional and artistic growth, which will never happen in the span of a few years of school (as a side note, child prodigies are abominations and should not be promoted). The purpose of classical training is to stretch the performative muscles of a student and put them in extreme situations so they can decide for themselves how to live a musical life after school. Natalie, instead of coming to terms with the imperfect nature of the classical music world, runs away from it and embraces improvisation. This in itself is not a complaint, but she obviously has not overcome her problematic (yet understandable) issues of perfectionism. Perhaps these will come through in a later memoir.
I also didn't like this book because of its constant shoe-horning of scientific studies. Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I strongly feel that individual scientific studies should not constitute as any sort of truth, and should not be the main focus of a book. I see many contemporary books do this and it always bugs me, since data can be skewed in so many different ways, not to mention how flawed the procedures of a scientific study can be. I'd much rather be told an opinion as truth and then decide if I want to agree with it or not. That might just be me though.
Anyway, I was hoping to enjoy this but I didn't. For a non musician, it's a decent look into the world of classical music and the ideas of improvisation, as well as some neuroscience. It did not appeal to me at all, though.
As an example, early in the book she describes how she failed to give a perfect performance of an incredibly difficult piece of repertoire as a young student, and she describes it as the most traumatic event of her life and the reason she quits classical music. As a classically trained musician, I know that music school places extreme burdens and expectations on very young students, but I also understand that trying (and failing) is part of the process. Becoming a virtuoso in any instrument takes many decades of persistent and directed training as well as emotional and artistic growth, which will never happen in the span of a few years of school (as a side note, child prodigies are abominations and should not be promoted). The purpose of classical training is to stretch the performative muscles of a student and put them in extreme situations so they can decide for themselves how to live a musical life after school. Natalie, instead of coming to terms with the imperfect nature of the classical music world, runs away from it and embraces improvisation. This in itself is not a complaint, but she obviously has not overcome her problematic (yet understandable) issues of perfectionism. Perhaps these will come through in a later memoir.
I also didn't like this book because of its constant shoe-horning of scientific studies. Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine, but I strongly feel that individual scientific studies should not constitute as any sort of truth, and should not be the main focus of a book. I see many contemporary books do this and it always bugs me, since data can be skewed in so many different ways, not to mention how flawed the procedures of a scientific study can be. I'd much rather be told an opinion as truth and then decide if I want to agree with it or not. That might just be me though.
Anyway, I was hoping to enjoy this but I didn't. For a non musician, it's a decent look into the world of classical music and the ideas of improvisation, as well as some neuroscience. It did not appeal to me at all, though.
April 15, 2024
What an extraordinarily thoughtful and moving book.
It took me a while to sink into it. As a scientist, particularly at the start of the book, I found myself constantly distracted by whether the quantum physics papers being discussed were accurately reported, or irritated by Hodges' use of unnecessarily complex language. Once I let go of those frustrations, I was thoroughly absorbed, so much so that I read the entire book on one very long flight.
As a hobbyist musician, I loved thinking about the malleability of time, and the way we use rubato to manipulate time, whether in musical performance, or (as I reflected) in public speaking. A little pause captures people's attention by disrupting our innate entrainment to rhythm.
I think there are many parallels between the art of musical performance, and the presentation or research at a conference, something I had not thought about before. "In music, you have to suspend your ego". This is also true in science. At least, in science done well.
"On one hand, it is inherently egotistical - presumptuous, even - to get up on stage and demand that others listen to what you have to say. But at the same time, performing requires humility: a willingness to risk being humiliated or misunderstood, and to lay yourself bare so you can try and say what you mean... that is what is at stake in performance: nothing more nor less than the longing for self-expression, to connect with others and be heard by them".
I liked this phrase so much. I even shared it briefly during a speech at a scientific conference. Researchers do the same thing, sharing our new ideas and data, with enough ego to believe we have something important to say, but enough humility to be challenged immediately afterwards during question time.
I liked the first two, and the last chapters best. The reflections on improvisation vs improvisatory music were enlightening. Finally, Hodge's experience of letting go of her fear, and accepting the support of the musician she was playing with during a performance, brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful, revelatory experience.
It took me a while to sink into it. As a scientist, particularly at the start of the book, I found myself constantly distracted by whether the quantum physics papers being discussed were accurately reported, or irritated by Hodges' use of unnecessarily complex language. Once I let go of those frustrations, I was thoroughly absorbed, so much so that I read the entire book on one very long flight.
As a hobbyist musician, I loved thinking about the malleability of time, and the way we use rubato to manipulate time, whether in musical performance, or (as I reflected) in public speaking. A little pause captures people's attention by disrupting our innate entrainment to rhythm.
I think there are many parallels between the art of musical performance, and the presentation or research at a conference, something I had not thought about before. "In music, you have to suspend your ego". This is also true in science. At least, in science done well.
"On one hand, it is inherently egotistical - presumptuous, even - to get up on stage and demand that others listen to what you have to say. But at the same time, performing requires humility: a willingness to risk being humiliated or misunderstood, and to lay yourself bare so you can try and say what you mean... that is what is at stake in performance: nothing more nor less than the longing for self-expression, to connect with others and be heard by them".
I liked this phrase so much. I even shared it briefly during a speech at a scientific conference. Researchers do the same thing, sharing our new ideas and data, with enough ego to believe we have something important to say, but enough humility to be challenged immediately afterwards during question time.
I liked the first two, and the last chapters best. The reflections on improvisation vs improvisatory music were enlightening. Finally, Hodge's experience of letting go of her fear, and accepting the support of the musician she was playing with during a performance, brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful, revelatory experience.
September 28, 2022
“Uncommon Measure” is a masterful memoir, one that reveals universal insights but particular truths about the author. The story loosens as the author’s attachment with her identity opens and we travel down new possibilities for artistic expression, romance and familial resolution.
It bears the mark of an artist, one who seeks to understand and share that space with her audience. There is a lived authenticity to the pages, a sense of a young person finding out who she is, or who she thought she should be.
Capricious and relative, Hodges relationship to time in her performances gives us something of an anchor. We immerse ourselves in time (p.16), music sculpts it (p.24), and our anxiety for performance is in the effort to recreation that perfected form and it’s timelessness. The memoir gets broader in scope, looking at larger issues of identity, family, and our fealty to a path. Given the impassive teachers, the stiff competition, anxiety induced health issues, one can wonder, where is the beauty in all this striving.
The hardship of being a violinist some 20 years, 5-6 hours a day, Hodges describes the beauty and pain of attempting to master Paganini or Bach’s pieces. We sense her admiration for the nuance of Bach’s Chaconne and the technical prowess for playing against the masters of the canon. But in her relationship to the violin we sense a more powerful beauty to move beyond the structure of repetitions and familiar repertory work. Whether she uses the metaphors of quantum physics with the incalculable behavior of atoms or improvisational groking, Hodges shares the beauty of discovery. Most powerfully using T.S. Eliot’s metaphor of the “still point”, she finds in artists like Montero or in a Tango dance class the beauty of ever-present awareness.
It’s always the quiet books that take your heart deeply into the mystery. Leave to the artist Natalie Hodges, in a self-effacing but elegant manner to describe the mutable nature of performance, transcendence of time and our intent to connect across ever-changing relationships.
It bears the mark of an artist, one who seeks to understand and share that space with her audience. There is a lived authenticity to the pages, a sense of a young person finding out who she is, or who she thought she should be.
Capricious and relative, Hodges relationship to time in her performances gives us something of an anchor. We immerse ourselves in time (p.16), music sculpts it (p.24), and our anxiety for performance is in the effort to recreation that perfected form and it’s timelessness. The memoir gets broader in scope, looking at larger issues of identity, family, and our fealty to a path. Given the impassive teachers, the stiff competition, anxiety induced health issues, one can wonder, where is the beauty in all this striving.
The hardship of being a violinist some 20 years, 5-6 hours a day, Hodges describes the beauty and pain of attempting to master Paganini or Bach’s pieces. We sense her admiration for the nuance of Bach’s Chaconne and the technical prowess for playing against the masters of the canon. But in her relationship to the violin we sense a more powerful beauty to move beyond the structure of repetitions and familiar repertory work. Whether she uses the metaphors of quantum physics with the incalculable behavior of atoms or improvisational groking, Hodges shares the beauty of discovery. Most powerfully using T.S. Eliot’s metaphor of the “still point”, she finds in artists like Montero or in a Tango dance class the beauty of ever-present awareness.
It’s always the quiet books that take your heart deeply into the mystery. Leave to the artist Natalie Hodges, in a self-effacing but elegant manner to describe the mutable nature of performance, transcendence of time and our intent to connect across ever-changing relationships.
December 20, 2022
"Equality describes an external relationship between separate entities...Instead it is symmetry--- from the Greek symmetria 'agreement in dimensions, due proportion, arrangement'---that offers, to my mind, a more apt metaphor for assimilation, because symmetry describes the relationship of a single identity to itself. Every personal identity is an entity in flux, a constant negotiation of the multitude of more specific identities that it comprises and their myriad proportions to one another." Combine this notion with the ideas in the book's Coda, and you've got some really profound thoughts on how we form, reform, experience, and understand ourselves. Hodges, who studied and performed violin for 20+ years, has moved through (past?) the part of her life where she is a violinist in a traditional sense, but clearly is still a violinist in ways that most of us will never be. She talks about her mother's experiences as an immigrant and her own as a Korean American as they relate to being drawn to play the violin, specifically to perform western classical music. I appreciate how she intertwines the arts and sciences as she explores her understanding of how being a musician shaped who she is and will become. She cites Carlo Rovelli a few times; he is my favorite physicist to read when it comes to understanding time and reality. Hodges' book had me listening to Paganini (new to me, maybe?) and Bach's Chaconne (by several different violinists) as I read. Finishing the book this way was nerdy and dreamy and perfect for a bitterly cold winter afternoon on break.
December 14, 2022
This is an interesting book that blends music, philosophy and physics into a memoir. Fundamentally it is the autobiography of a musician who has given up music but who still feels music deeply in the fiber of her being. To explain music and her relationship with it, she digs into a Bergsonian conception of subjective time and explains her perspective through analogies to physics. She doesn't ever claim that the laws of physics truly explain her relationship with music, but they provide her with a series of useful metaphors through concepts such as quantum indeterminacy, symmetry breaking, entropy and entanglement. You can't take any of this literally, but taken figuratively, it is beautiful and has great explanatory power.
Ms. Hodges is at her best writing about improvisation and contrasting it with traditional classical musicianship where the musician is trained to follow the music on the page, to memorize, and to find originality of expression in small creative gestures. The improviser follows rules but then breaks them. The improviser could follow any pathway but always seems to light on one that works from among the infinite choices. And when two people improvise together, if the magic is there, they find a deep connection that is like entanglement - spooky action at a distance. It was an original way to initiate the unenlighted such as myself into the mysteries of music.
Ms. Hodges is at her best writing about improvisation and contrasting it with traditional classical musicianship where the musician is trained to follow the music on the page, to memorize, and to find originality of expression in small creative gestures. The improviser follows rules but then breaks them. The improviser could follow any pathway but always seems to light on one that works from among the infinite choices. And when two people improvise together, if the magic is there, they find a deep connection that is like entanglement - spooky action at a distance. It was an original way to initiate the unenlighted such as myself into the mysteries of music.
April 2, 2024
Natalie Hodges’s Uncommon Measure feels like an impossible alchemy of themes—music, identity, time, and insecurity all fold into each other with effortless continuity.
Reading it feels like meeting the smartest person at a party, where their well-founded confidence is balanced by an understanding that there’s no need to impress anyone—it’s a party. You can’t help but want to listen to them talk because even their half-formed thoughts feel exciting and novel. That’s the vibe here.
Appropriately for a book about music performance, Uncommon Measure feels improvisational, like Hodges is simply following the book into its emergent shape. It’s exploratory, occasionally formless, but always beautiful.
If there are any critiques to be made, it is that Uncommon Measure displays an ever-so-slight first book urgency. Hodges seems to include everything here, as if she is unsure she will ever get to write again. I don’t think it weakens the book per se, especially because Hodges is an excellent writer, but it did make me wonder if some of these interesting themes or concepts won’t be developed in subsequent books because they are addressed here.
Regardless, I think Natalie Hodges has one of the most developed voices I’ve ever seen in a debut book, and I’m so excited to see what she writes about next.
Reading it feels like meeting the smartest person at a party, where their well-founded confidence is balanced by an understanding that there’s no need to impress anyone—it’s a party. You can’t help but want to listen to them talk because even their half-formed thoughts feel exciting and novel. That’s the vibe here.
Appropriately for a book about music performance, Uncommon Measure feels improvisational, like Hodges is simply following the book into its emergent shape. It’s exploratory, occasionally formless, but always beautiful.
If there are any critiques to be made, it is that Uncommon Measure displays an ever-so-slight first book urgency. Hodges seems to include everything here, as if she is unsure she will ever get to write again. I don’t think it weakens the book per se, especially because Hodges is an excellent writer, but it did make me wonder if some of these interesting themes or concepts won’t be developed in subsequent books because they are addressed here.
Regardless, I think Natalie Hodges has one of the most developed voices I’ve ever seen in a debut book, and I’m so excited to see what she writes about next.
August 22, 2022
Wow. This essay collection blew me away. Short review: go try this book out. Regardless of the topic and its interest to you. Try it. The first essay isn’t the strongest, but read up to Symmetry Breaking. Please.
In full, Hodges addresses topics of music performance, science of time, quantum physics (yes! and it was awesome!), and family. As an ex-violinist-ish, I really felt for her on many topics related to orchestra culture. I also, however, was very enlightened by the way she talked about being Asian in relation to playing the violin and all the ways that that challenged her. The failure to reach greatness or make it big struck hard, as someone who felt that pressure at a much smaller scale as a musician. Her thoughts on the human condition and connections will stick with me for awhile. And I listened to some great work because of this! (Watch Gabriela Montero Improvisations please!!!, she is so charming & so talented!)
In full, Hodges addresses topics of music performance, science of time, quantum physics (yes! and it was awesome!), and family. As an ex-violinist-ish, I really felt for her on many topics related to orchestra culture. I also, however, was very enlightened by the way she talked about being Asian in relation to playing the violin and all the ways that that challenged her. The failure to reach greatness or make it big struck hard, as someone who felt that pressure at a much smaller scale as a musician. Her thoughts on the human condition and connections will stick with me for awhile. And I listened to some great work because of this! (Watch Gabriela Montero Improvisations please!!!, she is so charming & so talented!)
April 3, 2023
Honestly, I didn't have the highest expectations for this book at first, but I will say that I was surprised positively. Despite using scientific explanations and metaphors quite often (I skipped some of those parts because I didn't understand a thing she was writing), so many parts of the book feel so human and relatable. Her musical journey as well as her anxiety being a performer was so understandable and the way she described it was amazing and so in detail. The section about improvising and how spontaneous it is but also how preplanned it seems is definitely my favorite part of the book, and I actually somewhat understood some of the science stuff she described in there (like 50%, at most). Overall, this is one of my favorite books, and anyone who is a classical musician or a musician in general I feel would love to read a book like this, a journal about someone else's adversities and development in their own musical journey through their life.
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