What If The Music Part is Part of You?

I hate to say it, but I have the feeling that our culture is breeding a sense of music as something clean, sterile, vacuum-sealed, quantifiable--anything but personal.

If personal, how?  I keep coming back to the same point: As soon as you catch yourself saying "I like it" or "I don't like it", even if you say whichever to yourself in silence, at that moment it has become personal.

But the rub lies in the words: "As soon as..."  My guess is that in the race to produce quantities of notes children are discouraged from noticing the qualities of particular sounds. 

The answer has to be "As soon as you make the first sound."

Alexandra Horowitz, in Inside of a Dog, describes the two-way transaction involved in getting to know a new dog.  Each creature reaches out to the other in a delicate exchange of sensations and expectations.  I think of her description when describing how we reach out to sounds, taking them in, as it were, before they actually reach us. 

In this way music is part of us before it even sounds.

Language as Singing

People are astonished that children of cultures where the spoken language is actually intoned -- China, most notably -- have a better sense of musical pitch than the children of "plain" spoken cultures.

Where is the surprise?  If you were the parent of a singing-culture baby that infant would have heard you singing to her from day one.  Thus the ear develops as a function of the everyday exchange with another human being.

Wow.  Are we getting far from that!

In my experience, by the time an infant is 3 months old it is already too easily distracted to pick up the auditory signal pure and simple.

It would be nice if more people believed me.  I can teach you how to teach your newborn to sing --  no kidding.

Taken Off Guard

Maybe it is not safe to be taken off-guard.  Maybe it's better to be always in control, to have a switch to turn off, an alternative channel to connect to, a way out.

Maybe sitting still to absorb whatever is happening is truly a thing of the past.  Hopefully not yet completely.

Once a week (sometimes more often) I find myself in an environment which is as formal as any I can think of in New York, a very high church Anglo-Catholic mass.*  I have been stunned, more than once, by awareness of the human complexity on the basis of which its rituals deliver their ultimate message.  What to an outsider might look like errors invariably are transformed into invitations to participate ever more profoundly in paying attention to the human realities, not merely to the prescribed formalities.

The person in charge, Andrew Blume, even occasionally pokes fun at his making it "as complicated as possible." 

It seems to me the best kind of ritual.

*St. Ignatius of Antioch

On the Newly Heard

Because we are so sure of what happens when we push buttons we are out of touch with the possibility that things happen in the interstices between touching and pushing those buttons.

We learn chord progressions.  Then someone comes along who has never learned chord progressions and introduces wonderfully off-beat details into what might otherwise pass for a standard harmony.
That off-beat detail grabs me.  I look for it every time I hear the live performance of the song but it always moves around, or is it that there were always several such details and I caught only one the first time and am now catching a different one? 

The great thing is that I'll never know.  I have to keep going back and listening for more.

That is what all good music making should be about, whether the piece was composed two days or two hundred years ago. 

Constant variation, no matter how "familiar."  Keep it (and yourself) moving.

Did I Really Hear That?

Composed or improvised into the most memorable musical experiences are sounds so unlikely that you must wonder whether you did, indeed, hear them.  Very often they masquerade as "normal" and are easily lost in a haze of approximated listening. 

It works like this:  I am listening to a song obviously inspired and informed by the blues.  The standard blues chords that go along with that style are compatible with the harmonization of the song - almost.  Not entirely.... 

Every once in a while one of the standard chords will contain a slightly off pitch, a bent interval here or there, introducing an element of mystery into the expected experience of a standard blues progression.

So you have to go back and hear the song again to check whether what you thought you heard is really there...this is the mark of real musical genius in every genre, not just the blues, but there as well.

The Like Factor(y)

The word is in disrepute.  First there were the Valley girls, now ubiquitous.  I am allergic to the likes of them.

Then came Facebook.  From time to time I feel obliged to log in, to see what posts I may have received since the last time - probably a week previous - and this brings me face(book) to face(book) with the word used differently.  I am asked to like the pages of friends, acquaintances, organizations...

Sorry, my definition of the word does not allow me to participate in this idiocy. 

Why don't we reduce everything to out and out popularity contests and leave out the like factor?  If you really need to count your friends do so forthrightly and admit that is what you are doing.  If you need a count of how many people recognize your name, that's different, isn't it?  

Music and Real Time

Time in music exists on three levels simultaneously:  the faster than fast time experienced by the performer, the kind of time we associate with rhythm, and the time of a life affecting every element of tone and meaning, potentially of every note we play.

The first kind of time is almost entirely missing from music instruction.  Yet it is the manifestation of time most vivid to children as they play, as it is to professional musicians who are really serious about their sound.  Inside of this time one is open to whatever is happening in a way that invites involvement in every instant to come.

The rhythm level of time is all too readily associated with rote learning, with repetition, with boredom.

Alas.

The lifetime is most difficult to discuss as it varies entirely from individual to individual.