My kid recently used her saved up babysitting cash plus a forward of future babysitting cash to buy herself an electric guitar....
(I, of all people, am a major consumer of recorded music, but I always feel so happy when people engage with living music, both as listener and as creator. My world is full of canned music, such that it becomes mindless - grocery store, beach, car... Everywhere has a soundtrack. I find it overwhelming at times, because I cannot seem to selectively ignore musical sounds in the environment. My ear demands I attune to them in some way, often with an analytical motion in addition to the original creator's intended emotion or mood.)
...I recently had the opportunity to sit for a long while and listen to a man singing and playing the guitar to his own compositions. What a joy that he could pour himself into a creative flow! My own involuntarily analytical ear felt trapped after a while of quiet listening, as all his songs used the same small set of chords and were all about the same tempo. In order to confirm to myself that I was not imagining things, I pulled out my phone for my practice app, where I was able to clock all of his remaining tempi between 80 and 90 b.p.m. Despite my own stylistic preferences, I was truly able to enjoy his engagement in the physical and creative world he accessed through poetry and muscles and wood and vocal chords....
...I used to walk by a house a few blocks from home where I often saw a man a couple of decades older than myself set up in his living room with a music video on his TV and his electric guitar in his hands, working at playing along, quite loudly, to music he obviously loved....
...Some weeks ago on a sunny afternoon I was at the neighborhood park across from the library with my two younger kids plus a friend from school, when I saw a middle-sized boy park himself on a bench with a euphonium, oblivious to the world for a portion of an hour in the middle of all the sunny-day, after-school hubbub. At first his blattings were messy, and I could not make sense of them. After five or ten minutes of his concerted effort, I was able to start discerning the bassline to the song Seven Nation Army - familiar to our family via the 2Cellos cover. Suddenly I realized the whole band at the neighborhood middle school must be rehearsing this piece, and I imagined a whole large room full of twelve-year-olds working at figuring out the tune....
(When I sat a few weeks ago to write these musings in my notebook with a ballpoint pen, my middle schooler, who had just learned how to play the Seven Nation Army bassline herself on her new electric guitar, was just below me in her Grampa's office, instructing her younger siblings in how to play it on her Grandma's acoustic guitar and ukelele.)
My favorite vignette along these lines, though brief, comes from a late evening walk in the Autumn with my middle kid on our daily 3.5-mile loop in the neighborhood. As we passed a certain house, I heard the strains of Mozart's "Ah vous dirai je Maman" Variations coming from an upstairs living room. I paused for a few moments to listen. The piano was not perfectly in tune, and the voicing was far from professional. I smiled deeply as I went on my way, know that a real live human being was sitting in that living room, fully engaged in Mozart's creative masterwork. I think I might have to go rifle through my piano music and read a bit of that piece (badly) on my own piano now...
