Your Al Queda harmonica teacher thread
Mar 08, 2010 by
libjpn
Well, kinda, actually just a music thread.
I'm embarassed to say that I did 3 years as a music major, thinking that I could be some sort of professional horn player, or something. Creative, you know. And I have this love hate relationship with music. I mean, had I spent the time I was learning scales or figuring out fingerings and transpositions and chord voicings on a couple of languages, well, who knows? On the other hand, there is a nagging feeling that if I had been a bit more efficient (and a lot more driven) about learning all that music stuff, well, again, who knows.
I've had two musical epiphanies in my life. I think this is why sports is a lot more popular than music, you play sports and you can get small epiphanies all the time, a fade away jumper that is nothing but net, a backhand passing shot that stuns your opponent, a sweet wedge that puts your ball a foot away from the cup. Maybe just as many people in the world get musical epiphanies as the number of people who get moments of grace in sport, but the thing is that in sports, one naturally finds their own level. I don't think that the backhand passing shot would fool people a grade above me, nor would that fade away jumper for anyone who has a modicum of height and ability. And the wedge shot, well, 1 good shot every 18 holes is not going to have you burning up the links. But you can get the epiphanies when you play people at your own level, but for music, at least for me, I really can only identify two times that the muses descended on me.
The first was when I was a freshman horn major and had gotten into the university orchestra. It was the student solo concert, where music majors competed for the opportunity to play a piece with the orchestra. I was able to play second horn for Griffes Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (you can see the part when the piece goes into Public Domain here, which illustrates another hard pill to swallow, what if all this music, all these resources, had been available for the asking when I was a horn major?) At any rate, I butchered the part in the one rehearsal before the concert, and was having serious doubts. But at the performance, I nailed it. And, the bizarre thing is, I had this vague feeling that I had played well, but I didn't remember any of it, but my horn teacher, who was very hard to please, came up with effusive praise and said that if I could play like that, I could be an orchestral horn player. But another 2 years of trying, I never really played like that, in the sense of playing outside myself, ever again. I still play horn, with a pattern of putting the horn up for a couple of years, and then getting invited to play and frantically getting my lip into shape and doing ok on the part, and then putting my horn up. In fact, I now play with the university orchestra, which is probably the perfect gig for me, because they have one concert a year, a lot of the players come to university with a vague idea that they want to play a musical instrument, choose one, practice like crazy, maybe play the opening their second year, the incidental piece the third year, and the main concert piece their senior year.
To give you an idea how this plays out in Japan, one of our graduates and a former member of the student orchestra, got a job in the university office. She had played second violin in the first concert that I played in, where we played Holst The Planets, and I asked her why she didn't play in the orchestra, and she confessed that she had never learned to read music. She had played the entire second violin part in the Planets, learning it by rote. I realize that it is not like being able to recite the entire Iliad, or reciting pi to the 100,000th digit (but you get a glimpse of cultural influence, don't ya?) On the other hand, I, having spent lots of time being sort of ok, could come in the last month of practice, get my lip in shape (just barely) in time for the concert.
But back to epiphanies, had I known that what I experienced 20+ years ago was going to be a one off experience, well, maybe I would have made some different choices.
But I did say two musical epiphanies, so here is the second. I also 'played' (I think the technical term would be 'covered') the jazz piano in the 1st university lab band. While I entertained ideas of being a horn player, I knew that I was only a jazz pianist in the way a length of duct tape wrapped around a radiator pipe was a repair. Still, despite a surfeit of incredible horn players, bassists, and drummers, there were no real jazz pianists, so I spent 3 years playing the the 1st lab band. And I could comp well enough to handle everything, but when it came to solos, I was pretty much a 16 bars and I'm out. So it is all the more surprising that at the beginning of the third year, we were reading a chart and I had a solo and somehow, I started playing this solo that somehow fit perfectly. And while I am tempted to attribute it to the monkeys typing Shakespeare thesis, I knew that I was doing it.
Yo-yo Ma gave an interview where he said that somehow, the cello just suited him. I often wonder if I had chosen a different instrument, would it have been different? I've often thought that for my 50th birthday, I would start a new instrument, and somehow, all those skills, like being able to adjust the pitch by stuffing my hand in the bell and figuring out transpositions on the fly would have me playing like the pro I should have been. Or maybe even get plugged into a transcranial magnetic stimulator and play like the love child of Denis Brain and Charlie Parker.
But then, I wake up and realize that my path was decided when I first started playing trumpet because my mom had all of the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass albums, and my cousin had a trumpet that he wasn't using, and in elementary school band, I got put on 3rd trumpet because I both didn't have the chops to hit the high notes and I was the only one who could hear the harmony, which then got me switched in junior high to the only left handed instrument in the orchestra, the horn. And 35 years later, I'm printing out Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel horn parts to play along with the orchestra recording. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
Comments
Mar 10, 2010, 05:37:27 Ugh wrote:
I still think a master harmonica player teaching al Qaeda how to do it constitutes material support. So there!
Mar 10, 2010, 07:27:07 nous wrote:
"...my path was decided when I first started playing trumpet because my mom had all of the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass albums, and my cousin had a trumpet that he wasn't using..."
I wanted to play drums, but my parents didn't want me playing them so I started playing horn because it was the only instrument that the school owned, which meant no renting or buying. Once I started playing horn the band teacher forbade me to switch because he needed horn players too bad. I dropped out of band when I switched schools. Sort of an anti-epiphany.
I played a little guitar for years, but what I really wanted was an electric and I had never had the $ on hand to get a decent one plus an amp and effect pedals. Amp modeling software gave me the ability to get the sounds that inspired me without having to spend over a grand just to get a decent metal tone (or an indecent one, depending on your opinion of metal). It's playing with those tones that keeps me coming back and playing where I never had before.
And the headphones are a plus for everyone else in the vicinity.
Mar 13, 2010, 13:35:25 nous wrote:
Been thinking about this off and on over the week and I've been wondering if where you gravitate in music depends on what part of it grabs you in the first place? Just in terms of guitar players I think there is a difference between, say:
-guitarists who love the instrument and want to become better players
-performers who love the energy of being on stage but aren't interested in becoming a more rounded player
-musicians who love playing with other musicians and jamming
-composers who love creating music but are less interested in being part of a band
I'm sure there are more types than this, but I think this covers a lot of ground for what motivates people to play an instrument. Think I'm somewhere in between the first and the last. I love the instrument itself and I love music, but I'm a musical introvert. If I were performing I'd stick to singing.
Mar 13, 2010, 21:06:43 OCSteve wrote:
On getting into music – I was drawn to it because it was a group I could deal with. I wasn’t a jock – certainly I was more of a geek. And the geeks went out for band. The “alpha” in our group sub-cliques was first chair.
As to why the trombone – we could not afford anything at all but a friend of my father had an old trombone sitting in his closet.
Thus are life’s decisions made… Because a friend of my dad had a banged up old trombone to lend me I was able to pursue music and gain acceptance within that group. Further peer pressure from that group forced me into an advanced academic group which led to an early and more prestigious diploma, which gained me acceptance to college (at least the first year), which led me to join the Army as a PFC rather than an E-1 which led to many other interesting things…
Mar 16, 2010, 08:52:49 Jeff wrote:
"I played a little guitar for years"
It's called a ukelele! [Rim-shot!]
Mar 17, 2010, 01:01:45 nous wrote:
I hope you are showing proper contrition for that, Jeff.
Mar 20, 2010, 21:32:13 JanieM wrote:
Just got around to reading this carefully. I could start rambling about music (piano, fiddle late in life and briefly, a few notes on the flute in high school, a few chords on the guitar eternally) -- but I won't.
I only want to say that I love this line:
Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
I had never heard it before. Thanks, lj! (Again.)
Mar 21, 2010, 07:30:26 libjpn wrote:
As much as I'd love to take credit, that last line is Camus.
Mar 28, 2010, 00:19:28 russell wrote:
[quote]Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.[/quote]
A paraphrase of a long quote, attributed to Dizzy Gillespie:
Every day I wake up and fight with the horn.
Some days I play great, the horn sounds great, it all comes together. I win.
Other days, I can't play shit. The horn wins.
This goes on for years and years and years. Then I die, and the horn wins.
A really broad number of factors that have to come together for someone to have a career as a musician, or even any kind of performing artist.
You have to have some ability.
You have to have the temperament to do the work, which is basically to sit in a room and do incredibly boring and repetitive things, over and over again, until they are as perfect as you can make them.
You have to bring a reasonable amount of drive and ambition to the table.
You have to be willing to put yourself out there, to ask people to listen to you and give you work.
It really, really helps if you are an enjoyable person to hang around with. Not required, but it will increase your odds enormously.
It really, really helps if you are a self-starter, good at organizing yourself and your time. It's a very hectic way of life, and people will rely on you to have your sh*t together.
You will probably be able to make a living, but you will probably not make a lot of money.
You will probably spend a lot of time playing stuff that isn't particularly interesting, with people who don't necessarily play that well, or aren't well prepared, or who don't take the music very seriously, or who have weird bad attitudes because they aren't as famous as they thought they would be, and you'll need to be able to deal with all of that and stay positive.
You need to be able to deal skillfully with all kinds of weird personal politics.
And generally a reasonable dollop of luck is involved, and when it strikes you will probably need to recognize that, in real time, so it doesn't get away from you.
And after all of that, you will probably have musical "epiphanies" -- moments of grace where everything comes together, seemingly effortlessly -- about as often as you had in your earlier career. Every few months, once a year. Maybe years without.
It's a really really hard path. Not necessarily harder than lots of others, but really hard, and hard in ways that you wouldn't really think. Actually dealing with the instrument and playing music is only a small part of it.
And, of course, if you really want to hang with the cats, the really good players, the guys that are really doing it, it will take a few years of solid, daily, unstinting drudge work, to the tune of 3, 4, 5, or 6 hours a day.
Every day, no days off, no vacations, no distractions.
I play a lot, but I'm not one of those folks. It bugs me sometimes, but I also have to recognize that if I was going to be one of the guys to really do it, then that's the way it would have actually played out.
To some degree, there's not that much choice. I'm not talking about the musical ability part, I'm talking about all of the other stuff that has to be there, and has to come together.
If you can put an hour, or even a half hour, a day into the horn, you will be able to keep your lip in shape enough to play some good stuff and really enjoy it. It's the dailyness -- at whatever level you can bring to it -- that will make the best musical experience happen.
It's like praying. You don't feel the presence of god every day, but if you don't put the time in, it likely will not happen at all, or if it does, you won't understand what it is, or why it happened.
If you can carve out 30 - 90 minutes a day, *every day*, you'll be playing some good horn and having some fun.
There ain't much better in life than that.
And in the end, the horn's gonna win anyway.
Mar 28, 2010, 01:19:01 russell wrote:
OK, another music story?
Long ago, about 20 years ago, I studied some jazz piano with a very good Boston area teacher. The guy is not well known out of jazz circles, but in jazz circles he's somewhat legendary. He was a wonderful, funny, generous teacher, and a true master of a difficult and demanding art.
Charlie passed away last winter, kind of unexpectedly. While he was in the hospital, he kept in touch with his students via email.
In one of his messages, he describes being in the ICU, with strange noisy beeping devices all around. The content of the email is how you can use every opportunity to practice, and he describes how, basically, he was using the different medical machine noises and beeps to do some ear training. What pitches they were at, what harmonies he could construct from those, what ear training exercises he could build on that.
I think that email actually popped up in DailyKos at some point.
With the really great ones, at some point there isn't a distinction between life and the practice of the art anymore. Everything is considered and understood in musical terms. There isn't a need to find time to practice, because everything is practice. If you're awake, you're practicing.
Even if you're not awake. Mingus' widow tells the story of being woken up by Mingus holding her like a bass and practicing scales on her in his sleep.
For the great ones, everything is music.
Thanks for this thread. Politics is interesting, but I could talk about music all day long.
Apr 09, 2010, 03:29:11 nous wrote:
Damn, russell, I missed these in all the rest of the traffic in my life. Nice posts.
I played 20 minutes yesterday for the first time in a week. Dissertation has my wrists screwed up enough that I can't play a barre chord anywhere below the 9th fret without pain and numbness.
Add health to the list of things required. I've been re-reading an interview with Michael Gurley of Dada that he did a few years back where he talks about having to ice before and after shows and switching to ultra-light strings just to get through a set.
Not that I'm any Michael Gurley.
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