Playing What's Not There

For most of my childhood, every piece of music I performed had an external purpose. Violin and piano lessons, orchestra rehearsals, recitals, auditions, competitions—all of it was aimed at something outside the music itself. I was performing for judges, for committees, for a college application that needed to look a certain way. I was hitting the notes. I was not playing.

That changed in my second year of college, when I heard a rendition of Yiruma’s “River Flows in You” for the first time. I found the sheet music myself, taught myself to play it without an instructor, and performed it for no one. There was no rubric. There was no committee. For the first time in my relationship with music, I was doing something because it made me feel good—not because it was expected of me.

I didn’t know then how much that moment would mean to me, nor how long I would spend struggling to find that same feeling in every other part of my life. There was always dissonance—between who I was and who I thought I was supposed to be, between what I genuinely wanted and what I showed the world. Jiu jitsu, it turned out, would be where I finally had to learn to resolve it.

Nowadays, my primary art form is jiu jitsu, though I have continuously found similarities between the two. In particular, the concept of rhythm has always been a huge part of classical music performance—rhythm plays a huge role in one’s interpretation of a piece and the emotion or story you want to evoke.

To understand the significance of rhythm, you need to know a bit of musical theory. Rhythm is how the notes in a piece relate to each other—are they far apart, close together, or a little bit of both? Tempo is the underlying beat of a piece, measured in beats per minute. When you turn on a metronome, you are tracking your tempo. Something can have a consistent rhythm but no discernible tempo. For instance, a birdsong may follow a rhythm of sounds when the bird starts to chirp, but you may not know when the next series of sounds will begin.

It would be a mistake to think that the categories of tempo are strict, however. Far from it—each tempo marking has a range of beats, with some markings having overlapping BPMs with different qualitative descriptions:

• Largo – broadly (40–60 bpm)

• Lento – slowly (45–60 bpm)

• Larghetto – rather broadly (60–66 bpm)

• Adagio – slow and stately (literally, “at ease”) (66–76 bpm)

And where tempo is like a speed limit on a highway, there are often signs along the road asking you to brake or accelerate accordingly:

• Rallentando – gradually slowing down

• Ritardando – gradually slowing down (but not as much as rallentando)

• Ritenuto – immediately slowing down

That both tempo and rhythm operate within ranges rather than fixed points is not a loophole—it is the whole point. The range is where interpretation lives. It is what separates a performer from a metronome.

On a visit home, bored and restless, I stumbled across Lang Lang’s autobiography. I was moved by the extremity of what he had endured to get where he was—the sacrifices, the pressure, the years of grueling work before anyone outside his immediate world knew his name. I was also, at the time, in a rut with my jiu jitsu, frustrated enough that I had started looking for inspiration in places I wouldn’t normally think to look. That led me to videos of Lang Lang teaching piano masterclasses—intimate sessions where, with just a few small adjustments and reframings, he helped pianists understand not just the technical demands of a piece but the emotion behind it. Not the composer’s emotion as an external fact to be reproduced, but something the pianist could feel and own themselves.

That’s when his central question stopped me: how does an artist create wonderment from notes that may have existed for hundreds of years, without reducing the performance to a mechanical act of typing them on a keyboard? The answer, he suggested, lives in the rhythm and tempo choices a performer makes—the places where interpretation becomes personal, where the same notes become a different experience depending on who is playing them and why. Jiu jitsu is no different. Moves that have been done for years—perhaps hundreds of years—may possess a variety of rhythms depending on how and when they are used. A single technique, when combined with others, may require an entirely different tempo to be effective. Part of the practitioner’s task is figuring out, for themselves, which rhythm serves the moment they are in.

The cost of misreading tempo in jiu jitsu is immediate and physical. If your opponent is moving frantically and you try to match their pace without the conditioning to sustain it, your heart rate spikes and you gas out—you’ve let someone else’s rhythm become your problem. Some moves won’t work at all unless you can summon a precise burst of explosive speed at exactly the right moment, and committing to that burst means you then have to read your opponent’s tempo shift as they scramble to defend, because if you aren’t tracking that change you become the one who is suddenly vulnerable to a counter or a reversal. And some situations simply punish hesitation outright. Mount is the clearest example: in the earliest moment of someone establishing mount, a quick frame at the hips and a capture of even just the ankle gives you a fighting chance to escape. Wait even a few seconds too long, and once they’ve peeled both of your arms away from your sides, the position is nearly inescapable. The window existed, and then it didn’t. Tempo decided which version of that moment you were living in.

It became evident early on that the problem wasn’t simply a lack of experience. Something in me was affecting my rhythm and tempo in ways that technique alone couldn’t explain.

With less experienced partners, I would find myself seeing multiple ways the round could go and making a quiet decision to hold back. I told myself it was for them—that I was protecting them from a discouraging experience, that I was being a good training partner. But what I came to understand was that this was its own kind of dishonesty. I was making assumptions about what they needed without asking, performing generosity instead of actually being generous. What they needed, and what I needed, was for me to focus on my own game—to create an environment of honest responses, to walk the subtle line between helping someone improve and making it so difficult that nothing useful gets learned. The spaz passing my guard wasn’t the problem. My assumptions were.

With more experienced partners, the problem was the opposite and the feeling harder to describe. It’s like reaching for something that isn’t there. In jiu jitsu you need connections—grips, frames, leverage—to create movement, but against someone truly better than you, you are not the one pulling the strings. You are the puppet. Every tempo you try to set gets absorbed or redirected before it becomes real, and you are left reacting to a rhythm that was never yours to begin with.

From both of these situations, it became apparent that something was wrong with how I was sparring. I was either too slow when I needed to be fast, or too fast when I needed to be slow, but the deeper problem wasn’t the tempo at all. It was that I wasn’t registering any of it. A round would end and I would feel like I hadn’t participated—like the techniques had been performed or done to me, but never really felt. There was no sense of what was right or wrong about any of them, no meaningful connection to myself or to what I was doing. It felt something like doomscrolling: passive movement through something that was supposed to require my full attention. The same hollowness I felt performing Tchaikovsky on a recording stage sat with me when I went through the motions of attempting a sweep, an escape, or a pass.

What puts jiu jitsu and music so closely together is the way they come to life—not through any single person, but through everyone involved. A symphony requires an entire orchestra, different sections in agreement to give something of themselves for a greater whole. Jiu jitsu is adversarial, but it carries the same mutual understanding: that two people are engaged in an art form, and that the art only becomes good when both participate with full presence. A great ensemble doesn’t just play the notes on the page—they play the venue, play off each other, carry the energy of everything that came before. A great match has the same spark. Both require showing up completely. And that, I realized, was exactly what I had not been doing. The un-fun sparring, the misread tempo, the moving without intention—none of it was really a technical failure. It was the result of fear. I would catch thoughts mid-round telling me to hold back, that I looked foolish for defending so hard, that I should perform for the room rather than be honest with myself. I was breaking the agreement. Not with my partner—but with my own sense of what was authentic in me, in favor of what I imagined everyone else needed to see.

When I first started to change how I sparred, I almost wanted to give up immediately. The storylines I had rehearsed were well-worn from all the other times I had tried and failed to change my training style. I told myself I couldn’t spar hard because my training partners wouldn’t like me—that I was just a hobbyist and didn’t need to push. That I shouldn’t use strength because jiu jitsu is supposed to be about technique, and that being aggressive would get me injured. That I was doing the next class anyway and needed to preserve my energy. Each of these thoughts felt true enough to be convincing and just comfortable enough to be dangerous.

These were huge mental blocks that I had to overcome before I could see any discernible change in my sparring tempo. That process was easier said than done, especially because these thought patterns had been ingrained over many years. Not only did I need good reasons for discarding these narratives—I had to supply myself with new ones that would better serve my actual aspirations.

In order to make a meaningful change, I had to do something I didn’t like to do: I had to share my feelings and fears with people who I thought could help me. This is usually difficult because my preference is to appear like I have things under control, which discourages me from admitting that I need assistance.

The deepest conversations I had were with my sports psychologist. What she helped me understand was that these thoughts were not evidence of personal flaws, or a lack of the will to win. They were my mind doing its job—protecting me from perceived harm by keeping me in the familiar, because the familiar offered certainty. Trying something new in sparring, committing to a tempo I hadn’t earned yet, meant embracing uncertainty. And uncertainty, to a mind that prizes control, registers as danger even when the only thing at stake is looking foolish in a gym. Once I understood that my need for control wasn’t a shortcoming but simply a natural feature of being human, something shifted. I became more open to the idea that I could be vulnerable—that I could show more of myself on the mat without that exposure being a threat.

I often ask for music during sparring because I don’t like the silence. My teammates and I joke that heavy breathing is not exactly the most motivating soundtrack. But the moments I remember most clearly—the ones where everything slowed down and sharpened at once, where I was finally moving with intention rather than just moving—those didn’t happen when Ava Max was blasting through the speakers. They happened in the quieter rounds, carried by something nearly imperceptible: the scramble of limbs searching for grips, the sound of my own heartbeat, the smallest shift in my partner’s weight that told me what was coming before they knew they’d decided it. The music was always there. I just had to stop performing long enough to hear it.

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Some tl;dr takeaways courtesy of Claude

1. Tempo is not just speed—it’s intention. Moving fast or slow matters less than knowing why you are moving at the pace you’ve chosen. Getting swept along by someone else’s rhythm without realizing it is not a tempo choice at all.

2. The cost of misreading tempo is immediate. Match a frantic opponent without the conditioning to sustain it and you gas out. Hesitate too long in a bad position and the window closes. Tempo punishes passivity and rewards presence.

3. Holding back is not always generosity. Slowing down for a less experienced partner can be an assumption disguised as kindness. What they need, and what you need, is honest engagement—not a performance of patience.

4. The mental blocks feel true because they are doing a job. The stories you tell yourself about why you can’t spar hard are not personal flaws. They are your mind keeping you in familiar territory because familiar territory feels safe. Understanding that is the first step to changing it.

5. You cannot resolve the dissonance alone. The shift only became possible when the fear was named out loud, to someone equipped to help. Appearing to have things under control is its own kind of performance.

6. The music is always there. Presence is not something you add to a sparring round. It is what the round becomes when you stop performing and start participating.