On Keeping Time and Natalie Hodges' Uncommon Measure

Early in her radiant Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, violinist Natalie Hodges quotes from the work of Patel and Iverson as she defines the term 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.'" Entrainment is not a uniquely human experience, but the ability to internalize a rhythmic beat in the body informs so much of human culture: dance, jazz, improv, and more. In this gorgeous and intelligent memoir, her debut, Hodges explores this concept of entrainment as part of a larger discussion around music and time and the performance anxiety that has plagued her career as a musician.

Regarding that debilitating anxiety, she explains that "Knowing what's to come -- and, more importantly, feeling secure in that knowledge -- allows you to let go and focus intensely on communicating, on keeping the piece's time and yet making its expression feel spontaneous. But when all you can fixate on is your weird psychotic certainty that you're going to mess up, no matter how well you've prepared -- that obliterates your sense of being in time."

I, too, am a musician (though nowhere near as accomplished as Natalie) and have also been stymied by performance anxiety over the years. My family still laughs over the Christmas piano recital in my teacher's low-ceilinged basement, when 8-year-old me blanked on what came after the opening bars of "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" and proceeded to cover that memory lapse by simply repeating the first musical phrase over and over again. And there was the time when I had a featured solo in college, singing the ethereal "I Wonder As I Wander" from the balcony during our choir's holiday concert. Again, my memory failed entirely, and I just vocalized a vague "Ah-ah-ah" with the melody over my friend Brad's guitar.

Unlike my undeniable (and oddly holiday-themed) blunders, Hodges' missteps probably wouldn't be heard as such by the average listener. Her remarkable skill and musicality come through in every essay, especially the stunning chapter on Bach's "Chaconne," the 5th movement of his Partita No. 2 in D minor. Hodges writes of her struggles to learn this notoriously difficult and emotionally demanding piece, of early overuse injuries from too much practice, and of the instructor at the elite summer practice camp she attended at 16, and who told her she "should probably start focusing more on school since there wasn't really much of a chance that I could be a soloist" and shouldn't be learning the Chaconne. Hodges describes her resistance to his blunt truth-telling as she continued to push herself over the next few years despite suspecting "deep down that it would never be enough. All the practicing -- the mind-numbing repetitions, the bloody fingernails, the brutally late nights -- was either a way of convincing myself it would all be worth it or punishing myself for the fact that it wouldn't, I'm not sure which."

In the present of the essay, Hodges has returned to the Chaconne after months away from her instrument after deciding to quit. But the Chaconne haunts her, "the shadow of something left undone," so she picks up the bow once again. And even if you've never heard this remarkable piece, her description of it is sonorous, illuminating the depth of her reverence for the music:

In the middle of the Chaconne, there is a pause that lasts for less than the space of a breath and yet, somehow for an eternity. The roiling purple darkness of D minor dissipates, and out of the silence begins a single D major chord, barely a touch to the strings, a breath of bright wind. The variations that it sets in motion play upon the same theme as before, but the surrounding harmonies that fill in its shape are D major. If D minor is darkness, then D major is light; it shares the minor's grandeur but not its sadness. It is radiant, ebullient, sparkling, full of life.

So, too, is Uncommon Measure. Whether she is outlining the loop between the auditory and motor-planning regions of the brain or detailing the intimacies of learning the Tango, Hodges has created a book that immerses readers in a sensory experience. And in telling the parts of her story she might rather keep hidden, she taps into a well of humility and vulnerability that renders her singular experience somehow universal. We may not all be concert violinists, but we know what it is to be hurt by a loved one, to be supported unconditionally by a parent, to sit silent in a capacious room as it fills with the thrill of music.

I've barely touched on the many wonders of this book, and I'm thrilled to be able to offer a few more opportunities to learn from Natalie and discover the beauty of her work. I loved getting to chat with Natalie recently, and I hope our conversation here will entice you to read her remarkable book, which is this year's featured title in Libby's Big Library Read program. From May15-29, Uncommon Measure will have unlimited availability for patrons using the Libby app through participating libraries. Natalie will also be joining me in a live, virtual conversation on May 27th, which you can register for here.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity

SBW: Who might be an ideal reader for your book? What disciplines or areas of interest does Uncommon Measure speak to?

NH: I would say that it's anyone in a sciences or humanities discipline who maybe -- doesn't feel satisfied isn't quite the right way of saying it. But this is somebody who's looking for resonances across the different aisles and various ways that we think. Maybe a scientist who is seeking metaphors in literature or music or art, or vice versa, somebody in the humanities who wants to feel that there is a deeper mathematical, physical underpinning to the things that they feel in art and who wants to know: is there something outside of me and my subjective response to art, to literature, that I can trace to something neuroscientific, something bodily, something out there in the wider universe? Anybody who has an interdisciplinary hunger and who doesn't want to limit questions to either the scientific universe or the human condition, who wants there to be some kind of interplay between the subjective realm and the objective realm.

SBW: What was it like to translate your training as a classical musician into writing?

NH: The acute stimulus came from fears around my experience of time, not only the kind of time-stopping due to anxiety, but just the reckoning with time that I was having to take on in my own life as I was in this process of moving away from music and thinking, oh, maybe this is not going to be the career that I thought it was. I was hopeful that there would be some way of, if not quantifying that experience, then grounding it in something that would be as concrete and scientific as I could get it. Something outside of myself.

The very early roots of the book were actually in a final project for an Evolutionary Biology class that I was just taking as a general education requirement. Actually, it was very hard. I didn't do so well overall in the class. But we could do anything we wanted for the final project, so I looked at the evolution of musical capability. Stephen Pinker refers to music as being auditory cheesecake. It's not something that serves any kind of vital biological function. And so the question is, well, why would we have it? Why would our capabilities as musical beings have evolved? And it turns out that there are all of these different hypotheses for why musical ability and the relationships between different areas of our brain, like the auditory and the motor circuits, and the ability to sync up with other people that results in dancing or chamber music --- all those are actually vital for not only the development of language, but also for group collaboration and cooperation. Of course, we survive better when we are in tune and in sync with other people.

Then I was thinking: why does time just stop for me in this shattering way when I'm anxious? and I said, you know, I wonder if there's something that happens in that circuit that's responsible for allowing us to literally be in time in music. I wonder if that gets disrupted by anxiety in some way. That kicked off the rest of the research and became this way of thinking, where I asked: can I approach something that feels truly existential about the time of my own life through what we can know is real through science?

SBW: I love that. I worry about the way we have structured our lives, such that many of our encounters with music are so fully individual. They're in our own ears, on our own devices, and isolated not just from other people, but from the tracks around them. Rather than putting on an album, you're only listening to the one track. With that isolation of experience, we might see some fundamental shifts in our evolution, especially as it pertains to how we see each other and how we see community, because we have narrowed it, made it so thin.

NH: That resonates very profoundly. Everything is about -- It's all about separation. I actually hadn't thought of that before, but you're so right that even a movement is now divorced from a concerto or an individual song from an album. Actually, one of my favorite albums that has come out recently was Beyonce's Cowboy Carter. She's directly pushing against that isolation and that kind of musical breakdown where it's like auditory chopsticks -- you can just go pick and choose. Because on that album, all of the tracks are continuous, so yes, you could go and select, but if you just pick one song, the end will feel really abrupt. You'll do something in the process. It's meant to flow to another, and even the way the final track ends is supposed to loop back into the first song. And of course, the first lyrics of that song are "Nothing really ends. For things to stay the same, they have to change again." I love that she did that. I hope that more artists do it. That's also why whenever you can, engage with live music. Of course concerts aren't affordable for a lot of people, but even if there's someone playing on the street or whatever, that allows you to remember that you're supposed to be feeling time pass in the same way with other people.

SBW: I couldn't agree more. There's something about that willingness to voluntarily enter into a shared time and space. Thank you, Natalie! I'm looking forward to continuing our conversation in a few weeks!