A Few Things I Remember About Thomas Riedelsheimer's film Touch the Sound

When Evelyn Glennie was young, she lost her hearing.
Her doctor said she would have to give up piano.
 Evelyn's parents didn't agree.

I remember finding the movie at the library.

I remember thinking that a deaf person couldn't be a musician.

I remember thinking there was such a thing as silence.

I remember thinking, for a good ways into the documentary, that I must have misunderstood the blurb on the cover because clearly, this is a hearing person.

I remember trying very hard to understand.

How do you hear?

How do you?

With my ears.

I hear with my whole body, says Evelyn Glennie.

I remember being riveted by her snare drum solo in Grand Central Station.  She played with her whole body, her face, her hair.  When she was done and people clapped, she seemed suddenly embarrassed.  Out on the streets she is easily confused by the many sounds coming from everywhere, whereas in an empty warehouse, or a concert hall, or a quiet restaurant, she's a star.

I remember thinking Fred Frith seems like a great guy.

I have many favorite scenes, but one I especially like: Evelyn playing in a restaurant in Japan, with an impromptu drum set she assembled with cups and kitchen utensils.

Thoughts About Music: Perfect Playing

A Flock of Thoughts about Music

Right Hand V. Left Hand: Hello

right hand

*

he said it's best not to do anything else

while listening

but what if

by drawing

or dancing

or singing

or washing

or painting

or dreaming

or scraping

we become more connected

to the music

what then?

*

left hand

Thoughts about Music: While Walking with Le Flaneur

Le Flaneur and I walk through the arboretum and talk about music.

I tell her how I learned music from a place of fear, fear of playing the wrong note, fear of being out of tune, fear of having the wrong opinion, fear of looking like a fool.  Music was a serious business, requiring years of practice to learn to do it right.  There was good music and there was bad music and it was important to know the difference.

I am trying to explain why I play music the way I do.

Le Flaneur presses: Isn't there a way that isn't so antagonistic?

Was I being antagonistic?

We stop to watch the wild turkeys foraging in the leaves.

We walk again and I start back in with the years of being scared to play in front of other people, the way it felt so rigid even when it was supposed to be fluid, the regret that I wasn't learning a less girlie instrument.

Le Flaneur asks:  Can't you express it without sounding like you are flipping everyone off?

Was I flipping everyone off?

I try one more time to explain what I've been trying to explain to myself for years: That what I'm most interested in practicing is coming to music from a place of joy rather than fear.

Le Flaneur has fears about music too, though she's never revealed to me what they are.

What Is The Lesson?

Why don't we enroll our young children in weekly private painting lessons, and require that they practice painting everyday, not painting whatever they like, but painting with the proper technique so that they can learn to perfectly replicate the works of the masters?

Why don't we encourage our children to play with musical instruments the way we encourage them to play with paint and chalk and clay?

Why are we so rigid in our approach to some art forms and so relaxed in our approach to others?

What is our purpose in offering these lessons to children?

Why is it that so many of us quit our lessons at some point in childhood and never pick up a brush or instrument again?

Sandbox Lesson #1

Make sure your sandbox is clean and clear of distractions.

Develop good habits right from the start.  Sit tall.  Do not slouch.

This is a shovel.

Shoveling an entire shovelful of sand is called a whole scoop.

When you see a  

shovel one whole scoop.

Now try this:

Shovel four scoops with a steady rhythm.

Try not to shovel off beat!  Use a metronome to help keep a steady beat.

Practice shoveling until you can shovel for three minutes without making a mistake.

For best success, practice daily.

Next lesson: Half scoops

In Defense of Not Having to Understand: Thoughts About Tiny Songs One Week Before the Opening Reception of the Wisdom of Wombats PoPuP Gallery

W.o.W. PoPuP Gallery Gala Opening

Thursday, April 24th, 5-8pm

502 West College Avenue, Appleton, Wisconsin

Footnotes:

*Rib Mountain

**Joseph Schumpeter (Wikipedia)
Schumpeter claimed that he had set himself three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, to be the best horseman in all of Austria and the greatest lover in all of Vienna. He said he had reached two of his goals, but he never said which two,^[12][13] although he is reported to have said that there were too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations.^[14]

On Becoming a Composer

Here's the type of thing I used to think about when my parents took me to the symphony.  I wondered why didn't the basses play the melody and the violins play the bass line.  I was curious how turning the music on its head would sound.  I never considered this "the moment I knew I would become a composer," since I never considered myself a composer until last night even though I've been making up music since I bought a bamboo flute in Cameroon in 1996.

We learned to read words and then to write in our own words.  But in music we learned only to read and not to play our own sounds.  I haven't been able to figure out why.  Where along the line did learning to play music become such a chore?  Why do we burden ourselves with sticking so strictly to a terse and serious course?

A composer was a person who spends a great many years studying every instrument in the symphony. And even though I imagined a composer hunched over paper (something I was very comfortable with), I knew they wrote in a language too tedious for my breed.  I didn't want to study, I wanted to play.

We played diddly bow until the glass broke.

One summer, riding my bike down a curving summer lane, a perfect sentence describing the arching maples gripped me with the need to write it down.  I raced home and made a notebook with a wallpaper cover and wrote the sentence in cursive.  That's the moment I knew I wanted to become a writer.

Or at least, that's the memory that emerged when it occurred to me to try to discover where this urge to write came from.

I did what I envisioned people who are writers do:  I wrote a novel and tried to get it published and then wrote a lot of short stories and tried to get those published and I convinced myself that I was on the right path and pushed myself to keep going even though the more I wrote the tighter the writing wound until it was wound so tight, it burst.

I ask the students to write about visions of their futures starting with a scene from the past.  One tells me she doesn't like the assignment.  Her vision of the future is too pessimistic she says and she's spinning her wheels trying to write about the past.  Forget the scene from the past and write about your pessimistic vision, I suggest.  She says it's too depressing.  Then imagine an optimistic future and write about that.  She says that's too unrealistic.  I suggest she not worry about that.  In that case, she tells me, she might as well just write about how she wants a live on Mars and have a pet unicorn.

Yesterday I told Tad what I used to think about when I went to the symphony with my parents.  And it struck me for the first time that here were the memories that indicated I would become a composer even though I never knew I would become one until the moment it occurred to me to tell the story of how I became one.

The Strange and True Failings of a Musical Education

Saul Steinberg's violinist

Here is a man who has played violin since he was a little boy, a man who practices everyday, who was first chair in the youth symphony, who graduated with a music degree from a prestigious university, who went on to get his PhD in violin performance.  This same man, who plays for audiences all over the world, is hired by a rock band to play some filler for an album, and panics, because despite all his years of training and practice and performance, he has never been asked to create a musical phrase of his own.

right-handed copy of Saul Steinberg's violinist

left-handed copy of Saul Steinberg's violinist

More Thoughts About Music Inspired By Conversations With Matt Turner and Tad Neuhaus

How we have been taught is how we tend to teach, so it's no surprise that it's a slow process, changing how we teach.  What we learn, we tend to defend, so it's also no surprise that we are offended at the implication that something needs to change.

Here's a question:  Why when it comes to teaching music are we so fixated on imitation rather than innovation?

Some would argue that you must "know the basics" before you can innovate.  But wouldn't it be more natural to learn to keep innovating from the very beginning before we've become bound by accomplishment?

A baby is delighted by the sound of the rattle in her hand.  It's absurd to suggest that we scold her for playing off beat and put sheet music in front of her to teach her 4/4 time.  At what point does our attitude change?

Why is a toddler exploring the sounds a piano can make a delight, but a twelve-year-old doing the same, a nuisance? Why do we equate music making with strict rules of conduct?  Why are we shown on our first music lesson the grand staff, immediately taking the origins of music making out of the body and onto the page?

Why not encourage children to keep exploring sound the way they naturally do, by experimentation? Why can't we see this as a way to enhance our musical traditions rather than a threat?

There are music teachers who use improvisation and composition as the basis of their teaching.  Tell them thank you and encourage them to not give up.

Why I Like The Shaggs

I like the Shaggs because everyone knows how it's supposed to sound. And the Shaggs don't sound like that.

The Shaggs make you wonder:  What music would you have played, if you had been pulled from high school by your father, along with your two sisters and told to make a rock and roll album?

Chances are, nothing you would have made would be as inventive as Philosophy of the World, 32 minutes and 25 seconds of listening that makes you hear music in a brand new way, an album people are still talking about, nearly a half century after The Shaggs recorded it.

tad neuhaus, organ

joanna dane, vocals

More Thoughts About Music

Why is the image I see in the mirror, so different from the image on the photograph?  Which is a more accurate portrait?  And why do I feel so connected to this physical self when I've accepted that we all are manifested from the same sauce of energy.  Sounds like crazy talk.  It's difficult not to be foolish and cheesy and egotistical.  I used to lament that I hadn't become a musician, that I had failed to develop the most passionate art.  I blamed it on classical flute, which ironically is what also opened the door to new music.  New music is old music, very old music, when music was nothing more than people getting together, ancient music that arose as spontaneously as conversation.  My parents didn’t like the Music from Ugandan Jews CD.  It wasn’t professional, they said.  Just some people getting together in the village to sing.  But how much better can it get than that, to be in the heart of the music making, not only in the moment that the notes are produced, but the moment the notes are conceived?  Often, it is not about notes at all.  Often it is about wave or color or story or dance or emotion.  Notes, an artery in the soul of sound.  What about Evelyn Glennie?  Watch Touching the Sound and get back to me.  What about Meredith Monk and Keith Jarrett?  What about Andy Goldsworthy?  (Another must see: Rivers and Tides.  Same director.)  The most beautiful things are revealed.  All improvised, created in the moment for the moment and nothing more.  It takes time to get reacquainted with these types of sounds, having become so attuned to music engineered by industry, we no longer consider village music an art form.  A single listening is not enough.  I must listen three or four or more times until I can allow myself to hear what it actually happening.  How to divorce our ears from the perfection of the recording studio?  How much spontaneous music does anyone ever get to hear these days?  Maybe if you live in a big city where there’s lots of street musicians.  But mostly, musicians are afraid to play what hasn’t been rehearsed many times before, because they are competing with the engineered sound, highly refined and intellectualized and commodified.  Thank goodness for this new music movement, appearing in house concerts from Appleton to Austin, our porch music revolution.  Thank you for sitting on your porch Wednesday evenings when the weather permits and playing live music.  And thank you for spreading the word.  

tad neuhaus, banjo
joanna dane, vocals
emily dickinson, words

Thoughts About Music #38,574X

Thoughts About Music #8509H

Thoughts About Music #579T

A Few Things I've Learned About Music

If you want to be a real musician, you must have a foundation in classical music.* All other forms of music are inferior to classical music, though jazz is a very close second. Country music is for stupid people. Rap is just a lot of noise.

If you want to learn to play an instrument properly, you must take private lessons once a week and practice at least a half hour every day, though one hour is better.

Practice every piece until it is perfect.  Playing a piece perfect means you do not make a mistake.

Playing music for other people is nerve-racking because you are being judged.  To play all the notes in the proper order for the proper length of time means that you are a very good musician.  To play all the notes in the proper order for the proper length of time with emotion means that you are an excellent musician.** When you make a mistake it means one of two things: you are not talented enough to be a good musician or you did not practice enough.

The Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic have excellent musicians because they never make mistakes.  The Omaha Symphony and the St. Louis Orchestra have good musicians, but not great, because they sometimes makes mistakes and sometimes play slightly out of tune.

The most talented musicians are born with perfect pitch and become very annoyed when other musicians play out of tune.

In order to be a great musician you must always practice your scales.

Violin and piano are the hardest instruments to play.  If you want to be a great violinist or pianist you must start taking lessons when you are five.

Playing in the orchestra means that you are a serious musician.  Playing in the band means that you are a dork.

To hear good music, you must dress up and go to a concert hall.*** Always clap when the conductor comes out on stage.  Never clap between movements.

Playing music is not the same as playing.  Playing music is hard work and very good for you which means it is not a game and not meant to be fun.

The dynamic markings and accents are there to make a piece interesting and must be played how they are written.

People who listen to loud rock music have bad taste in music.

Music you just make up will not be good music unless you are a composer.

Foreign music is either boring or annoying.

Street musicians are bums.

You are either born with a good singing voice or you aren't.  Never sing in public if you do not have a good singing voice.

If you are born tone deaf don't even try to play an instrument or to sing. It is possible, though, to become a great appreciator of music.

Jazz musicians improvise.  Improvising means playing music without reading it off the page and is very hard to do properly.  Playing jazz is fun unlike playing classical music which is serious but more rewarding.

Black people have a lot of rhythm and play jazz better than white people.  Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck are notable exceptions.

It is important to learn to play an instrument when you are growing up but not as important to continue playing it once you are an adult.

It is very difficult to learn to play an instrument when you are an adult, so don't even try.

If you don't know how to read music, you will never be a great musician, though people will be awed if you can play by ear.

It is painful to listen to people trying to play instruments they don't know how to play, therefore never play an instrument you haven't learned how to play.

*European

**Playing with emotion is an elusive thing which can not be taught.

***Jazz on the Green is the exception.