“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.”
Igor Stravinsky
I was in fifth grade when buses pulled up at my grade school one day to haul us off to Northrup Auditorium at the University of Minnesota so we could experience a matinee concert by the Minneapolis Symphony. Someone took to the stage before the concert to explain what we were about to witness and how we should experience it. She told us that the composer intended for us to see specific pictures when listening to his music. We were to close our eyes and try to get an image in our minds of what the composer was seeing. She even helped us out by telling us that in the piece of music we were about to hear the composer wanted us to see sheep on a green hillside. I gave it my best shot—my brow furrowed and eyes tightly shut, desperately trying to summon up the predetermined picture. Nothing. I could hear the music. I could feel the hard arms of my chair and the kid squirreling around next to me. But the smell of our wet wool jackets was the closest I could come to anything ovine. And no green grassy hill.
I was subtly and thoroughly convinced that day that I was not equipped to properly experience music…and certainly not classical music. I already played four musical instruments—accordion, flutophone (a plastic recorder), trombone, and cello—but if I couldn’t see the pictures I must be kidding myself. I wasn’t aware at the time of how demoralized I had been by the concert experience.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has spoken of how our school system installs a poetry deflector shield in students that stays in place for a lifetime. Music appreciation classes did the same thing. I had been drawn to music since infancy. My first toys were a cardboard guitar and a plastic Emenee accordion (later replaced by a 120 bass Italian instrument). But classroom experiences of “Blow the Man Down” and rounds and descants and invisible sheep on hillsides were deadly dull and disappointing.
I had two other experiences at that time, experiences that redirected my life and saved my soul. They were so natural and organic that it took me many years to figure out their importance.
My parents went out one evening and I babysat my two younger brothers. After I got them tucked into bed I settled in to wait for our folks to come home. The house was filled with a quiet, deep, and ominous loneliness. I turned on the radio…a hefty plastic pre-Bose-System high-fidelity tabletop radio with a great sound. I searched for distant mysterious AM stations like the one from Little Rock. Instead I came across the most amazing sound I’d ever heard. I’d never been transported by anything in that way before. I floated and bobbed on some distant sublime bed of cloudy, comforting loneliness for what felt like an eternity. I didn’t want to ever come back. I didn’t know or think about what style of music it was. I’m certain now that it was something “classical.” I didn’t need instruction on how to appreciate it.
Soon after that we moved to a farm in southern Minnesota for a year. My brothers and I spent a summer exploring woods, trails that had never been seen by human eyes, and abandoned pig and chicken sheds—literal farm animal ghost towns. My favorite things to do that summer were reading and going alone to my private outdoor spot. Behind some barns there was a gigantic galvanized grain storage bin. It had some sort of mechanical fan/drying unit at its base. I would sit nearby, listen to its endless drone, and sing long tones in unison or harmony to it. Time would stand still.
I had no concept of the musical or meditative implications involved, or the way that drones and repetitive music would dominate and compel me throughout my life. And when I fell completely in love with Joe Zawinul’s eponymous album in my 20’s it never occurred to me that it matched in some way my late night fifth grade radio experience.
The fact is, all my energy since those days has been aimed at recreating the sensations I've described. My music listening, playing, and “teaching” (not to mention my endeavors in other art disciplines) are based on the deep belief that others have had experiences that are similar in some way to the ones I've related here. The sensibilities engendered by those experiences may be deeply buried, but they are sending out a homing signal. If people can be diverted from the input coming from teachers, lessons, magazines, and marketing it’s possible to find the music that is calling to them. The music deflector shield can be uninstalled.
BTW, this is what my Emenee accordion looked like. What a beaut’!
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