Duets

Recently a friend challenged me to pick up my flute again and play duets with her.  She had just learned to play the violin a year ago and I hadn’t played my flute much in decades.  Even more, I had never played duets.  I’d either played solo pieces my teacher assigned or played as another tiny cog in the big high school orchestra.  I had no idea how to play duets with just one other person.

In contrast, my friend had been playing duets with her teacher who had been coaching her on how to make music with someone else.  The first time we practiced together, she used her breath and the movement of her bow to signal me when to come in.  And, amazingly, that is all it took to make a duet of our individual parts.  With the breath and bow cues my friend gave me, I was able to pace myself to her playing and find the music in the two musical lines we were playing so we came together to make a single piece of music.  It was more fun than I could ever have imagined and together the music we made was much more than the sum of our individual parts.

As much as playing duets seemed to be unfamiliar when I started playing with my friend, as I think about aikido and sailing, I realize that duets are actually a common part of life.  In aikido, we practice in pairs, taking turns as uke and nage as we learn the kata or forms. Our visiting master teacher from Japan frequently exhorts us to listen to our partner as we practice.  In previous visits, I didn’t quite know what he meant, but now I think he was encouraging us to breathe and move together as a duet and make aikido music together.  He will be here again soon for a weekend seminar and I will be listening to my partners more attentively than last summer as I try to find the aikido duet.

Similarly, in sailing, when it’s time to tack from one course to another, I can do it solo, but a little awkwardly.  Tacking works best when two of us coordinate on the jib, one of us releasing the working sheet and the other simultaneously hauling in the lazy sheet which then becomes the new working sheet as the bow of the boat crosses the wind.  When done right, the boat almost sings as it shifts smoothly from one heading to another and there is a wonderful sense of comradeship that develops as we work together to trim the sails.

In short, duets were not something new to me as I thought when my friend challenged me to play flute with her violin.  They have always been a part of my life, not just musically, but in aikido, sailing, and many other activities.