And this is why Ma sways as he plays: Because he can’t restrain himself. Because he is experiencing the same emotions that he is trying to express. Because he is letting himself go. “The best storytellers always get really into their own stories,” Ma says. “They’re waving their arms, laughing at their own jokes. That’s what I try to be like on stage . . . I know that some of the best music happens when you let yourself get a little carried away.” (In many respects, Ma’s obsession with spontaneity and expression — and his disinterest in perfection — evokes an earlier mode of performance. The classical music of the eighteenth century, for instance, is full of cadenzas, those brief parentheses in the score where the performer is supposed to play “ freely.” (The practice peaked with Mozart, who wrote cadenzas into most of his compositions.) In these frantic and somewhat un-scripted moments, the performer was able to become a personality and express what he felt.)
To make this kind of performance possible, Ma cultivates an easy, casual air backstage. Thirty minutes before the concert begins, Ma disappears into a quiet room. When he reemerges, I expect him to be somber and serious and maybe a little nervous. Instead, Ma is just as disarming and funny as ever, teasing me about my tie, eating a banana, and making small talk with Adolphe. This ease is not a pose: Ma needs to stay relaxed. If he is too clenched with focus, too edgy with nerves, then the range of his musical expression will vanish. He will not be able to listen to those feelings that guide his playing.
“People always ask me how I stay loose before a performance,” Ma says. “The first thing I tell them is that everybody gets nervous. You can’t help it. But what I do before I walk onstage is I pretend that I’m the host of a big dinner party, and everybody in the audience is in my living room. And one of the worst things you can do as a host is to show you’re worried. Is the fish overcooked? Is the wine too warm? Is the beef too rare? If you show that you’re worried, then everybody feels uncomfortable. This is what I learned from Julia Child. You know, she would drop her roast chicken on the floor, but did she scream? Did she cry or panic? No, she just calmly picked the chicken off the floor and managed to keep her smile. Playing the cello is the same way. I will make a mistake on stage. And you know what? I welcome that first mistake. Because then I can shrug it off and keep smiling. Then I can get on with the performance and turn off that part of the mind that judges everything. I’m not thinking or worrying anymore. And it’s when I’m least conscious of what I’m doing, when I’m just lost in the emotion of the music, that I’m performing at my best.”
1.
There is something scary about letting ourselves go. It means that we will screw up, that we will relinquish the possibility of perfection. It means that we will say things we didn’t mean to say and express feelings that we can’t explain. It means that we will be onstage and not have complete control, that we won’t know what we’re going to play until we begin, until the bow is drawn across the strings.
While this spontaneous method might be frightening, it’s also an extremely valuable source of creativity. In fact, the act of letting go has inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture, from John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. It’s Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue — most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. Although this kind of creativity has always been defined by its secrecy, we are now beginning to understand how it happens.
The story begins in the brain. Charles Limb, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, has investigated the mental process underlying improvisation. Limb is a self-proclaimed music addict — he has a small recording studio near his office — and has long been obsessed with the fleshy substrate of creative performance. “How did Coltrane do it?” Limb asks. “How did he get up there onstage and improvise his music for an hour or sometimes more? Sure a lot of musicians can throw out a creative little ditty here and there, but to continually produce masterpiece after masterpiece is nothing short of remarkable. I wanted to know how that happened.” (The birth of jazz improv is often traced back to Charles “Buddy” Bolden, an early-twentieth-century cornetist and one of the most popular musicians in New Orleans. In 1907, Bolden had a psychotic break, and he spent the rest of his life in a mental institution. (He was buried in an unmarked grave in 1930.) According to Dr. Sean Spence, a psychiatrist at the University of Sheffield, Bolden suffered from dementia praecox, an illness that was later classified as a variant of schizophrenia. Spence speculates that Bolden’s unrelenting “madness” — he was hospitalized after threatening to attack people in the street — was actually a crucial inspiration for his “madcap” musical improv. His disordered thoughts, combined with his inability to read music, allowed him to arrange notes in a new way. Subsequent studies have found a disconcerting correlation between success in jazz and mental illness, from the heroin addiction of Charlie Parker to the er-ratic moods of Thelonious Monk to the debilitating depression and phantom-limb pain of Cole Porter.)
Although Limb’s experiment was simple in concept — he was going to watch jazz pianists improvise new tunes while in a brain scanner — it proved difficult to execute. That’s because the giant superconducting magnets in fMRI machines require absolute stillness of the body part being studied, which meant that Limb needed to design a custom keyboard that could be played while the pianists were lying down. (The setup involved an intricate system of angled mirrors, so the subjects could see their hands.) Each musician began by playing pieces that required no imagination, such as the C-major scale and a simple blues tune memorized in advance. But then came the creativity condition: the subject was told to improvise a new melody as she played along with a recorded jazz quartet.
While the subject was riffing on the keyboard, the scanner was monitoring minor shifts in brain activity. The scientists found that jazz improv relied on a carefully choreographed set of mental events. The process started with a surge of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area at the front of the brain that is closely associated with self-expression. (Limb refers to it as the “center of autobiography” in the brain.) This suggests that the musician was engaged in a kind of storytelling, searching for the notes that re-flected her personal style.
At the same time, the scientists observed, there was a dramatic shift in a nearby circuit, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). While the DLPFC has many talents, it’s most closely associated with impulse control. This is the bit of neural matter that keeps each of us from making embarrassing confessions, or grabbing at food, or stealing from a store. In other words, it’s a neural restraint system, a set of handcuffs that the mind uses on itself.
What does self-control have to do with creative improvisation? Before a single note was played in the improv condition, each of the pianists exhibited a “deactivation” of the DLPFC, as the brain instantly silenced the circuit. (In contrast, this area remained active when the pianist played a memorized tune.) The musicians were inhibiting their inhibitions, slipping off those mental handcuffs. According to Limb, this allowed them to create new music without worrying about what they were creating. They were letting themselves go.
But unleashing the mind is not enough — successful improv requires a very particular kind of creative expression. After it slips off the handcuffs, the brain must still find something interesting to say. This is the generation phase of the improv process, in which performers unleash a flood of raw material. What’s so astonishing about this creative production, however, is that it’s not reckless or random. Instead, the spontaneously generated ideas are constrained by the particular rules of the form. The jazz pianists, for instance, needed to improvise in the right key and tempo and mode. Jackson Pollock had to drip the paint in a precise pattern across the canvas. Or look at Yo-Yo Ma: his emotional release always fits the exacting requirements of the music. He sways, but he sways in perfect time. “I think the best way to perform is when your unconscious is fully availabl
e to you, but you’re still a little conscious too,” Ma says. “It’s like when you’re lying in bed in the early morning. I always have my best ideas then. And I think it’s because I’m still half-asleep, listening to what my unconscious is telling me. But at the same time, I’m not in the midst of some crazy dream, because then it’s just crazy. I guess it’s a controlled kind of craziness. That’s the ideal state for performance.”
How does the brain find this liminal space? That was the question asked in a recent fMRI study by neuroscientists at Harvard in which twelve classically trained pianists were told to invent melodies. Unlike the Limb study, which compared brain activity during improv and memorized piano pieces, this experiment was designed to compare brain activity during different kinds of improv. (This would allow the scientists to detect the neural substrate shared by every form of spontaneous creativity, not just those bits of brain associated with particular types of music.) As expected, the various improv conditions — regardless of the musical genre — led to a surge of activity in a variety of neural areas, including the premotor cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. The premotor activity is simply an echo of execution, as the new musical patterns are translated into bodily movements. The inferior frontal gyrus, however, is most closely associated with language and the production of speech. Why, then, is it so active when people compose on the spot? The scientists argue that expert musicians invent new melodies by relying on the same mental muscles used to create a sentence; every note is like a word. “Those bebop players play what sounds like seventy notes within a few seconds,” says Aaron Berkowitz, the lead author on the Harvard study. “There’s no time to think of each individual note. They have to have some patterns in their toolbox.”
Of course, the development of these patterns requires years of practice, which is why Berkowitz compares improvisation to the learning of a second language. At first, he says, it’s all about the vocabulary words; students must memorize a dizzying number of nouns, adjectives, and verb conjugations. Likewise, musicians need to immerse themselves in the art, internalizing the in-tricacies of Shostakovich or Coltrane or Hendrix. After musicians have studied for years, however, the process of articulation starts to become automatic — the language student doesn’t need to contemplate her verb charts before speaking, just as the musician can play without worrying about the movement of his fingers. It’s only at this point, after expertise has been achieved, that improvisation can take place. When the new music is needed, the notes are simply there, waiting to be expressed. It looks easy because they have already worked so hard.
These cortical machinations reveal the wonder of improvisation, the mirrors and wire behind this magic trick of creativity. They capture a mind able to selectively silence that which keeps us silent. And then, just when we’ve found the courage to create something new, the brain surprises us with a perfectly tuned burst of expression. This is what we sound like when nothing is holding us back.
2.
Clay Marzo has been waiting all morning for waves. He’s standing with his surfboard next to a no trespassing sign on the edge of a pineapple field, looking down at a remote beach on the north-west shore of Maui. There are no tourists here because there is no sand, just a field of jagged lava rocks and a private dirt road. The tide is still too far out, so the waves are trashy; Clay hasn’t said a word for more than an hour. He hasn’t even moved. He’s just been standing in the hot sun, staring at the sea.
The waiting ends shortly after 1:00 p.m., when the trade winds begin to blow. Clay rubs his hands together furiously, like a man trying to start a fire, and lets out a few guttural whoops. He then grabs his board and quickly descends the steep slope in his bare feet. There are a few surfers in the breaks to the right, away from the rocks. Clay heads to the left, where the waves are bigger. He paddles out and starts scanning the horizon, counting the seconds between the heaving swells. After a few minutes, Clay abruptly turns around and points his board toward the shore. His body goes taut and he starts to push backward. The wave is still invisible but Clay is already searching for the perfect position. And then it appears: a six-foot wall of blue. The water rises until it starts to collapse, which is when Clay pops up onto the board. He accelerates ahead of the break — his sudden speed makes the wave seem slow — and then he snaps upward, launching his board into the air and somehow whipping it around so that he lands backward on the disintegrating lip. For a dramatic moment, Clay seems off balance, but then he reverses the board and calmly rides the white-wash until it can no longer carry him. The wave is over. He’s already looking for the next one.
I’ve just watched Clay execute the Marzo reverse, a move he pioneered. At first, these six seconds of aquatic choreography seem like every other professional surfing move: there’s a whirl of saltwater spittle, a reckless leap into the air, and an improbable landing. But what makes the move so astonishing is that Clay reverses himself in midflight, swinging his surfboard in a circle and landing on top of the wave backward, facing away from the shore. “You have no idea how hard this is,” says Mitch Varnes, Clay’s manager. “He is surfing the wrong way, which is crazy. Boards were designed to go in one direction. He makes his go in two.”
This ability to invent a new move — to improvise in the sea — is a defining feature of Clay’s surfing style. “I remember seeing those first grainy videos of him surfing,” says Strider Wasilewski, the surf team manager at Quiksilver, Clay’s surfing sponsor. “And it was clear he was doing stuff that nobody else was. He was doing moves that didn’t even have names. You know how rare that is? To see a young kid doing something completely new in the water?”
This creative talent has helped make Clay one of the most celebrated surfers in the world. He already has a national surfing title and numerous Hawaiian titles; he’s been featured on the cover of Surfer magazine and is a mainstay on YouTube. “Clay’s kind of a surfing freak,” says Kelly Slater, a nine-time Association of Surfing Professionals world champion. “He’s like a cat, always landing on his feet. He definitely knows things that I don’t know.” When I ask other pro surfers about Clay, they also mention his insatiable creativity, the way he’s always improvising in the water. “Every once in a while, a surfer comes along who makes everyone else look a little boring,” Strider says. “After you watch Clay, it can seem like the other guys are just performing the same moves, over and over again.”
What makes Clay’s innovative surfing even more impressive is that he was born with a handicap: Clay has Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. The syndrome is largely defined in terms of social deficits, which means that Clay is easily over-whelmed by other people and often struggles to express himself. In recent years, autism has also been associated with the absence of imagination; people with the disorder are said to suffer from a severe literal-mindedness. In fact, the DSM IV — the 886-page diagnostic guide for psychiatrists — lists “a lack of normal creativity” as one of the nine defining features of autism-spectrum disorders.
The creativity deficit of autistics has been studied most closely by Simon Baron-Cohen, a scientist at Cambridge University. In one study, he gave a group of autistic children a booklet of papers filled with incomplete “squiggles.” Baron-Cohen then instructed the autistic children to complete the drawings by adding new lines. “I want you to make lots of different things,” he told the kids. “Be as creative as you can.”
The results of this creativity task were sobering: children with autism scored far below normal. They completed 75 percent fewer sketches than the control group. (“But it’s not a picture of anything!” was a common response.) Baron-Cohen concluded that children with autism suffer from a severe “imaginative deficit,” which confined them to a more “reality-based view of the world.” They were so immersed in the literal — in the actual contours of the squiggly lines — that they couldn’t see the possibilities.
But Clay is an important reminder that there are many different forms of creativity, and that autism doesn
’t impair every kind. In fact, Clay’s ability to innovate in surfing is rooted in a defining feature of his mental disorder. Hans Asperger, the Viennese pe-diatrician who first identified the syndrome, in 1944, said that Aspergerian children tended to have an “encompassing preoccupa-tion with a narrow subject . . . which comes to dominate their life.” Some children with the syndrome become obsessed with nineteenth-century trains or drip coffeemakers or The Price Is Right. Others will memorize camera serial numbers, even if they show little interest in photography. Asperger argued that such obsessiveness is often a prerequisite for important achievement, even if it comes at a steep social cost: “It seems that for success in science and art a dash of autism is essential,” Asperger wrote. “The necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world . . . with all abilities cannibalized into the one specialty.”
What makes Clay so unique is that his obsession is a sport and not an abstract intellectual category. He just turned twenty-two, but he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t obsessed with barrels, short boards, and the daily swell report. Sometimes, Clay loses track of time in the water, so he ends up surfing for eight hours straight; his girlfriend has to carry fresh water to him or he gets lightheaded from dehydration. When I ask Clay what he would do if he couldn’t surf, he looks confused for a second, as if he’s unable to imagine such a terrifying possibility. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess then I would just want to surf.”
Clay was different from the start. He walked without ever having crawled: at the age of seven months and one week, he stood up and took his first steps. Although Jill, Clay’s mother, is a warm and physical person — she’s a professional masseuse with an easy laugh — Clay never liked being touched. He stopped nursing after only a few months. And then there was his strange relationship with water. The only way to get Clay to fall asleep as a baby was to put him in a warm bath. “We’d do four tubs a day,” Jill says. “I’d put my hand under his back and let him float with the tap running. He’d pass right out.”