I’ve been playing the drums a little bit lately. There’s an electronic drum set at my school, and once in a while, I get the opportunity to sit in with some of my students, many of whom are talented musicians who share some of my tastes in music. Earlier in the year, a couple of my colleagues offered a class in Improvisational Sound, where the goal was to help the students loosen up their expectations in order to express their creativity more fully. I had the joy to sit in with them a few times as well.
I’ve also started picking up the guitar more often. Because so many of my students are passionate musicians, there seems to always be an acoustic guitar or a ukele lying around, and regardless of whether I’m in a meeting, leading a lecture, or facilitating a classroom discussion, I never hestitate to cross a room to pick it up and bring it back, at which point, I pluck melodically on one string (I call myself “The Master of the One String”), or I strum rhythmically with no real sense of what sound is about to come out (outside of its relative pitch to the sound just before it). I’m not good on a stringed instrument, but I don’t let that stop me from picking up and playing one, regardless of who is around.
I like that about myself. I like that at the age of 40 (going on 41), I have no shame about my musical abilities or lack thereof. I sing nearly at the top of my lungs every morning as I ascend the stairs to my classroom. I sing whenever I have to cross the street from one building to another, not caring who else might be on the sidewalk or across the way on the school’s semi-public lawn. I break out in song if some line from a lecture or dicussion reminds me of a line from a song, or if the line is actually a musical allusion that I hope my students might recognize. It’s gotten to the point where one of my coworkers said to me recently, having come across me singing in the hallway, “Oh, I’d heard you sung a lot, but I’d never actually experienced it before.” This caught me off guard because it told me that when I was not in the room, other people discussed that I sing a lot — that’s how often I sing.
I’m listening to music as I type you this. It’s an album by Holly Bowling, a woman I know absolutely nothing about, except for the fact that she recorded an all-piano rendering of an entire suit of Grateful Dead songs (the song I’m listening to now is “Cassidy”). Her album is on a playlist I’ve been using for over a decade, adding to and subtracting from it as I see fit. The playlist is entitled “Writing Tunes.” It has over 385 songs with hardly a lyric among them, a mix of rock, classical, jam, and jazz, played by musicians whose homelands are spread across the globe. It is my exclusive writing playlist, and it’s been playing behind pretty much every word you’ve ever read of mine, a soundtrack to some of the most intense moments of my life.
When I was a kid, I went to a lot of concerts. I don’t really do it much anymore, but I try to go to at least one concert every summer, and another during the other months if I can get the energy (and the money) to make it happen. But when I was a kid, when I was working nearly a full-time job and living off my parents’ resources, I had disposable time and income like it was no one’s business, and so I spent a good chunk of both on rock concerts. I can’t say that I miss being a regular concert goes. I’m glad I was one once, but one or two concerts a year is about all I can handle at this point, physically, emotionally, and financially. I’m okay with that too.
I’m lucky enough to live in a community where so many people are welcoming musicians. There’s a lively bluegrass scene in southern Vermont, and virtually every musician I know has some connection to it. I don’t know how much you know about bluegrass, but the only thing you have to know is that it’s an incredibly forgiving genre of music that rewards a sloppy player as equally as it rewards a technical virtuoso. The latter may play and sound better than the sloppy player, but that doesn’t stop the group from letting us sloppy players have our say.
For years, I would do periodic drop-ins at a bluegrass open-mic hosted by the only bar in my village. Emboldened by some irrational sense of belonging, I’d stand on a stage with up to a dozen musicians, mostly guitar players sprinkled with a stand-up bass, at least one mandolin, sometimes a fiddle or two, and even a couple of times, at the height of the open mic, horn players, harmonica players, and even an accordion, and I’d stand there, with a pair of metal forks, bashing and strumming a metal washboard as loudly as I thought was necessary to enhance the other musicians’ experience of what I took to be the rhythmic time of the song they were playing, a song I was often hearing for the very first time. I’d play for hours. In fact, as my wife started to feel the first pangs of childbirth late on an open-mic night, I looked her in the eye and said from that barroom stage, “Hold on, just one more song.”
I used to wonder if I was any good at creating music, but I don’t really care anymore. When I’m playing, I give my all in service to the music, and let all else be damned.
Part of the reason I believe in transcendence is because of music. I believe music comes to us from another plane. We bring something to the experience, but the music brings something too, something extra, something from a place beyond us (though not beyond our understanding).
As a time-based art, music can color a passing moment with significance, providing it with a meaning that otherwise might not have been present, increasing or decreasing the moment’s tempo and intensity and pushing it into subjective relationship with the moments before and after it, creating for us our reality.
The improvisational music I play and enjoy helps to create my daily reality, turning what could have been a passed-over moment into something to pay attention to, something to give my all.
I am thankful for that, and I recognize that this gift of music comes to me from someplace beyond me. I only try to do the best I can with it while I’m here. It might not be very good, but it’s what I’ve got.