I’ve always had a very complicated relationship with music.
Since I first started to fall in love with music around the age of 16, my life has been powerfully shaped by music. It is, after all, the soundtrack to our lives. Almost every era of my life - from the grumpy, bad-hair days of high school, to the fiery political action of college, to the maturing (I hope) young man of his middle twenties - has been heavily defined by the music I was listening to.
Music is a big deal in my life. I own a record player because I believe vinyl sounds better. For a semester, I hosted an alternative hip hop radio show at the College of Charleston. I have a particular friend, a good buddy of mine named Anwar, that I can spend literally hours talking to about obscure jazz bands from the late 60’s and early 70’s. There’s a chance I could be described by some people as a music geek.
And yet, up until very recently, I couldn’t play a single instrument. In fact, I got down right terrified any time someone handed me a guitar, a drum, even a tambourine and asked me to join in making music. I was terrified of singing in public (with the obviously exception of my car, windows rolled up, volume turn to 11). And believe me, it took a fair amount of alcohol and quite a few hip hop house parties to finally teach this awkward white boy how to dance.
What a predicament. I loved music, but I was terrified of playing it, or singing it, or stomping it. Scared shitless of dancing to it, moving to it, grooving to it.
Why? Well, I had plenty of reasons why. My parents never encouraged me to pick up an instrument. I never listened to anything but pappy Christian music until the age of 13 (no offense to Jesus, but some people sure make some corny music in His name). I never did band or orchestra in school. I had plenty of reasons why I can’t, why I couldn’t, why I shouldn’t.
Somewhere down the line, I had gotten convinced that music was a complicated arrangement of notes on a page. It was years of training and countless hours with a tutor. It was being up on stage, totally cool and confident, getting all the girls. I had all these ideas in my head about what music is and why I could love it, but not make it.
All of my ideas of music, however, lacked one, interesting thing: the actual sound of music.
Something utterly mysterious happened when I heard a saying of Ali Akbar Khan, the famous Indian sarod player, quoted by Alan Watts, a teacher of Eastern philosophy: “All music is in the understanding of one note.”
One note?
That’s it?
Just one little note?
Thankfully, when I heard this quote, I was conveniently in a room with a guitar – one I had owned for years and attempted many times to learn to play, not so successfully. I grabbed it, placed it on my lap, and…. hit one note. And listened. I hit another note. And listened. I tried this several more times, until it dawned on me that in all my years of listening to music, I had never stopped to listen to just one sound. I had heard songs and albums, all of which seemed far too complex for me to ever participate it, poor me of little talent. But in the sound of one note, that story I had been telling myself for so long just melted away.
I started playing the guitar in my free time. My girlfriend got me a wooden flute from Nepal for Christmas, and I bought myself a didgeridoo from a local store. I started to play music. I have no idea whether it was any “good” – I really wasn’t thinking about that much. I just tried to enjoy the sound I was making. There is almost a stupid simplicity in this, but some of the most beautiful things in life are staggeringly simple.
There is something magic about music in the way that it has been present in almost every single human culture on this planet. It is an almost universal way of expression. Even the birds, the whales, and the oceans are singing. Making music is an act where we lose ourselves a little and fill that opening with a connection to the cosmos, to the heavens, to the soul.
This is why Hindus chant Om, why Buddhist chant the sutras, and why Christians sing Hallelujah. The message isn’t so much in words, but in the sound. There is something sacred to sound, for it represents the primordial vibration at the core of life. When our connection to the heart of life is active and joyous, some beautiful things can happen.
Like making music.
I don’t know if I’ll ever perform music in public and I’m still fairly confident that I’ll never land on the cover of Rolling Stone in this lifetime, but I like to consider myself now both an admirer and a maker of music. Whether you are playing Beethoven on a violin or plucking just one string on a guitar, you are making music. Whether you are playing syncopated rhythms on a drum or humming in the shower, you are participating in beauty.
Greatness can appear in things that are small. The profound can be discovered in the simple. Joy can be found in finally hearing one note.
~ Matthew Foley
0 comments:
Post a Comment