Kenny Werner: Becoming the Instrument

When we hear music, we often experience how the physical flirts with the spiritual in profound and moving ways. Werner contends that this confluence is possible not only in music, but also in your daily personal and work life, and it's easier than you think.
In Becoming the Instrument, Werner shares insights and anecdotes from his 40 years of studying, performing and teaching music, including a guide for accessing the spiritual in our everyday existence and applying it to the pursuits we love. Werner shows us how to lift our daily performances to their highest level by being spontaneous, fearless, joyful and disciplined.
Whatever you are trying to master, Werner says the key is learning how to slip into "the space," the place beyond the conscious mind that allows us to effortlessly embody whatever we are doing. Entering this sort of flow state might seem esoteric and difficult to achieve, but his easy exercises will allow you to access and achieve mastery, because "mastery is not perfection, or even virtuosity. It is giving oneself love, forgiving one's mistakes, and not allowing earthly evidence to diminish one's view of one's self as a drop in the Ocean of Perfection."
NOTES
This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.
Author photo courtesy Kenny Werner; main image is detail from book cover.
FEBRUARY 3, 2022
SPEAKERS
Kenny Werner
Pianist and Composer; Artistic Director, Effortless Mastery Institute, Berklee College of Music; Author, Becoming the Instrument: Lessons on Self-Mastery from Music to Life
In Conversation with George Hammond
Author, Conversations With Socrates
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[@geepers100]

Revolutionary stuff that should turn music pedagogy on its head. Thankyou Kenny Werner and thankyou interviewer for giving him space to speak .

[@jazz4asahel]

I know that i am a self-teaching closet double bassist and electric bassist with no training and a tiny bit of theory and a huge desire to play who realizes that I am limited to my own world of practicing jazz for myself along with recordings hoping that one day the regular bassist cannot make it and i am drafted into a real gig.

[@renakmans3521]

Brilliant!!!

[@anandapriyamusic]

Thank you for this great interview

[@DJSTOEK]

Thanks

[@d.l.loonabide9981]

"Abandon concern for hitting the right note, then hit the right note"-Guitar Craft Aphorism.

[@morkus26]

18:33 the essence of political correctness.