Apr 14 2009
What’s a musician, anyways?
This question has been on my mind for some time now. What exactly does it mean to be a musician? Long before modern instruments were invented people were banging rocks together and blowing into animal horns. The human voice is the oldest, most versatile noisemaker ever to exist. But in the beginning, is noise all there was? When did someone first want to replicate the tune of a birdcall, or the rhythm of his or her footsteps? Who was the first person to stop and appreciate these sounds for being just that: sounds?
I’ve been studying music since I was a toddler. My parents put me in one of those “Baby’s’ First Music Class” groups, where we sat in a circle banging on drums and shaking maracas. I don’t know for certain, but I’d assume it was fairly reminiscent of our musical pioneers banging rocks on hollow logs and shaking dried carob bean pods. Are you a musician if you can bang your mother’s kitchen pots and pans together? Maybe, maybe not.
I started taking piano lessons when I turned four. I remember them well because they were frightening. I had a yellow book in which each week my teacher would write down my assignments. When my mother would come to pick me up at the end of my lesson, my teacher would hand her the yellow book and pat me on the back of my head. I would go home and complain about not wanting to practice the piano and my mother would sit in the living room with me until I had gone through enough repetitions of each exercise.
Years went by, and I began to play the trumpet. I began writing songs, singing in cafes, and improvising with friends. I studied trumpet at the conservatory, and started practicing long hours. I got pretty good and ended up going into university for trumpet; by this point music really was my life. Younger students would call me and ask me to teach them, and adults would look at me and nod approvingly: “A talented young musician.”
Interestingly enough, I didn’t really understand what it meant to be a musician until a few weeks ago. Isn’t it funny how we can live and breathe something for our entire lives and still not really understand it? Let me explain.
Just this past year, (in January), my private trumpet teacher and I decided to make a lot of very crucial changes to my playing technique. It’s difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t gone through the experience himself. The best comparison I can come up with is when Tiger Woods decided to re-vamp his golf swing. He had been quite successful with his game for many years, had publicity and a good public status. If he had wanted to, Tiger could have accepted that to be the high point of his career, and enjoyed the fame while it lasted. But instead, he realized that there were all sorts of new athletes who were better than ever and his current game, although good, wasn’t good enough.
Over the months that followed, Tiger Woods deconstructed his golf swing. He broke everything down into tiny pieces and bit-by-bit rebuilt his swing into something better, stronger, and more accurate than before. This was his intention: a few steps backwards for many more forwards.
So in January I began to work with my private teacher to break down my playing. I can’t even being to describe how difficult it is to pull apart over 10 years of habits. And, once it’s all broken down, you’re left with thousands of pieces of what used to be the one thing you were good at, and no idea how to put them back together. Demoralizing. It was at this time that I really began asking myself what it meant to be a musician. I thought, “how can I call myself a musician when I can’t even play the trumpet?” A few very long weeks passed. I remember feeling like without the ability to play trumpet there was no place for me in the studio at the university, no place for me in the musical community… no need for a trumpet player who couldn’t play trumpet.
That’s when I became a musician. I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself and accepted the long and very, very difficult path that I had willingly embarked upon. I discovered that being a musician extends far beyond the walls of a practice room, the teachers’ studio, and even beyond the concert and recording halls. In fact, I soon allowed myself to accept that playing trumpet is a very small part of myself as a musician. It’s about curiosity, the willingness to make mistakes, and the courage to laugh out loud. It’s about faith, communication, honesty, integrity, and collaboration. It’s the desire to make something from nothing, to realize the potential of a blank page and a room full of colleagues. Being a musician has less to do with technical virtuosity and more to do with the journey you take to get there, and how those experiences shape and inspire you.
I don’t know if this is something that can be taught in schools. But if you ask me, it was the most valuable lesson I have ever learned. For all of the “young talented musicians” out there: continue to practice, and practice hard. But don’t forget that it takes a lot more than chops to be a real musician. I myself am new to this journey, but refreshed and engaged, at last.
Go to the library and take out the complete symphonies of a composer you have never heard of.
Play for your friends and learn from your friends. Play your friends’ compositions, with your friends, and go see every single concert, recital, and master class you can.
Go learn a new language, write a poem, climb a mountain, laugh at your mistakes, and look forward to your progress.
Dear Trumpetbelle,
It seems to me that, essentially, your university program is teaching you to be the best musical technician you can be. And so when you broke your technical abilities into to their constituent parts, you naturally felt lost and out of place in your professor’s studio. You couldn’t compete. Like Tiger, you lost a few rounds while you were sorting things out. You were still an artist, you still had similar technical proficiency to your colleagues, but you couldn’t use your abilities to create sound in the same way that they could. Just like any school, a university can only mark based on measurable facts, so technical perfection in the course subject is all that will garner an “A” in classes. While your colleagues were scoring high marks and gaining themselves academic respect, you found yourself alone on the sidelines doing the same valuable work.
At a cursory glance, a university music department is an odd system. Young artists congregate in ridiculously large groups, and pay ludicrous sums of money for the privilege of becoming elite technicians. But let’s step back and examine what makes a musician worth listening to. What is it that moves us? What is it that captures our attention? Technical proficiency is important; without the right notes at the right time in the right place, there’s no music at all. But there’s something else. There’s another half. I like to call it Truth, and it seems to me that Truth is something that all artists are capable of expressing. To me, a Truth is something large or small, something new or old, something unique or something universally common, that an artist so fully understands that they are able to recreate and share a part of it.
We still haven’t explained why artists would choose to place themselves in an environment that only values one side of they work that they do. Especially strange is the fact that the individuals allowed into the program are the most technically proficient ones, as selected by audition: those who seemingly would least need assistance with their technique.
Is it fair to say that the environment really only values one half of the work that goes on within its walls? Absolutely. And are there people within who believe that by excelling at their academics they will eventually win a position with an orchestra or a band, and have a long and successful career? Of course. And there are professors who believe it too. But since the vast majority of people who congregate there are artists, students and staff alike, they will listen to what you have to say as well as how technically perfectly you say it. It seems to me that the greatest majority of people at school for music are there more for the presence of like-minded peers to exchange little bits of knowledge with than for anything the institution has to teach them. For it’s people that inspire others. People teach each other through their actions. And people help each other find their own Truths, either through inspiration or explanation. And though sometimes people get caught up in the weighted values that the institution hands them, fundamentally they will respect you for what you manage to say with your art.
So head up high, and keep ploughing through. And even if you can’t express yourself the same way that the people around you can, keep trying. They’ll get the message. And who knows, perhaps you’ll clean the floor with them one day.
And congratulations on your newly discovered Truth.
That’s where I leave. It’s a bright sunshiny day and my Jimmy Cliff album is reminding me that a gin and tonic is in order.
With love,
A Stranger