Most of the people I’ve taught consider themselves, to a greater or lesser degree, singers.
Most of the people I’ve taught do not consider themselves musicians.
How can this be? If
you are making music with an instrument or your voice, aren’t you by definition
a musician?
This is a spoon.
When you
were a baby someone put this in your hand and put the bowl of Baby Gruel in
front of you and you made it work. You weren’t
graceful, but you got the thing to bring the food to your mouth (more or less).
It was not, at that time, a spoon. At that time is was shiny, smooth, cool,
hard, loud when you banged it, exciting when you threw it, something to push
things with, something that other things would fit in, something you could eat
the stuff that slipped out of your hands with.
It didn’t have a name. Somebody
taught you the name of the thing while you were in the process of using
it. You didn’t remember the first time
they told you. You had to hear the word
and see what it was applied to a number of times before it stuck.
It’s easy to color outside the lines if
you don’t see them in the first place.
What my students are trying to say when they say they are
not musicians is that they’re aware of their inability to speak Music in the
vernacular of the language shared by musicians.
Music, to them, is the spoon to the baby. Is the spoon any less a spoon, or the baby
any less a Spoon User because he can’t give the spoon a name? Of course not. And likewise, some of the best musicians in
history have been uneducated, or “ear” musicians. Some of your favorite songs have been written
by musicians who would not call themselves musicians because they couldn’t
speak the language of music.
Not being confined to the rules of the language can give a
musician room to be innovative. Irving
Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Nelson, and Kurt Cobain were all untrained
musicians. John Coltrane, arguably the
most influential musician of the 20th century, had only limited
exposure to academic music training. The
thing about not knowing what a spoon is supposed
to be is that you’re more likely to find amazing things it’s not supposed to be, but is.
Back to our baby…
It’s easy to imagine that baby going right along using his
spoon and nobody teaching him what it was called, or, when they tried to tell
him he said, “I’m using it! I don’t need
to know what it’s called”! As he
continued to eat with other people, it would become increasingly embarrassing
to have to ask for “the silver, shiny, smooth thing that can shovel food”. In fact, a person like that might be inclined
to avoid eating with other people who did
know the names of all the dishware.
And that’s sometimes what happens to musicians who don’t speak
the language of music. Not being able to
speak the language of music to can limit them both in terms of how far they can
go, or are interested in going, into music. It can also limit what music
experience they’ll expose themselves to because, well, what if everyone else
speaks the language and I look dumb?
What if they find out I’m not “real?”
Music or anything else.
I’m not advocating for musical illiteracy, don’t get me
wrong.
If you’re aware of feeling hampered by the lack of a
particular body of knowledge, if you know deep down that you’d feel more
confident in your abilities if you were to learn a thing or two about a
particular discipline or language, if you’re defending your right to be
ignorant at the expense of feeling “real,” then I think you should be honest
with yourself.
I’m advocating for you climbing your mountains, one at a
time.
I want you to begin to walk the path. Because carrying around a feeling of being “less
than” because of something that’s easy to fix just ain’t worth it. Things you’re afraid of are never as scary
once you really look at them. Avoidance
only compounds the fear. It’s just a spoon, in the end. And if you’re able to embrace your own experience,
and your experience is outside the prescribed path, then good for you. Play them spoons with feeling!
