Ours is a very heady culture.
We’re constantly thinking about things. We judge things. Assess things. We churn with anxiety, wanting things, or not wanting things. From the moment we wake up, to the hour after we lay our heads down on pillows and finally drift off to sleep, our heads churn in go-mode.
In our go-mode heads, there isn’t often music. Unless you’re already a composer or working professional musician. For most, incessant thinking drowns out what music may lie beneath.
The thing is, you are a musician. It’s only that for most of us, the music is deeper down.
There is the possibility of bringing that music out… and in the process becoming more of who we are.
Living Is music-making
If you live, you are a musician.
Our lives are marked and memorialized by music at every turn. Our lives are music. We compose some kind of tune through the process of living.
There is music when we are born (lullabies), there is music at our weddings. There is normally music at the funeral to celebrate our lives when we die.
Music is bonded to our memories and touchstones of our lives. For me, I put on a 90’s playlist and am transported back to adolescence and high school. The angst, the passion, the uncertainty, the awkwardness, the breaking of boundaries, the rebelling, and conforming. The trying-on of new identities. Frosted tips. Hair parted down the middle. Braces. Longing…
All in response to “Motorcycle Drive-by” by Third Eye Blind.
The imaginary divide
There’s an imaginary boundary westerners put up between musicians and audience members. We’ve come from a culture where the “talented” people play, and the rest of us sit back and enjoy. In the ideal scenario, we’re singing along, or even dancing.
In spite of this cultural oddity, there is a drum in the middle of your chest called a heart. It summons us into each and every moment. It does magical things. Even some of the science gods have recently informed us that it operates like a brain of its own. The darned thing even has brain cells.
But for our purpose of reminding you that you are musician, let’s think of your heart as a drum.
It drives rivers and streams of blood through our bodies in a rhythm. Our breathing comes in and forms part of the musical process that we are. Our days begin and end, the seasons change and the years go by and our bodies become and unbecome. Our being is musical. In the body, in the rhythm of living. Our world is musical too. Like strings tuned to different frequencies, everything is vibrating in its living process.
Whenever someone asserts “I’m not musical. I don’t have the talent for it,” I smile to remember that I am speaking to the bearer of a heart-drum, who is able to manipulate pitch and tonality with extraordinary precision and musicality, manifesting as speech. A person who is, quite literally, a music-making machine.
In reality, there is no artist, and no audience member. There are only musicians with beating heart-drums and voices of every timbre, making music through their living and being.
Why do we hold our inner musician back?
There are certainly those who may enjoy music, but don’t necessarily feel a calling to sing or play an instrument…
But there are also those so-called “non-musicians” in another category. They are the ones who sit beside the guitarist or pianist at a party, and raptly watch their fingers on the keys or frets. Who inquire about how that person learned to play, or how long they have been playing. Such people might be heard to say something like: “I tried to learn, but I just don’t have the aptitude for it.”
There’s a mysterious principle that life never seeds anyone with a desire that cannot be realized. Therefore, the desire to make music is a very, very important piece of information. It is a call to adventure. It is heralding a new trail into the woods of the unknown, where part of that person’s greater expression lies.
What holds us back from moving into our unlived potential as musicians is not the lack of talent…
It’s simply that venturing into the woods of the unknown can be quite frightening. Many never answer the call.
“Music” is actually a verb (Musicking)
If you have ignored the call to music-making in the past, don’t worry. Everyone ignores the call to greater expression at some point. That’s what being human is all about.
Did Luke Skywalker go with Obi-Wan to fight the Empire when Obi-Wan first invited him? No, he did not.
But if you are hearing the call now, it is time to take a moment to try something new, and test the veracity of this story that you are not a musician, or “not talented.”
Never mind “music.” It’s time to get down to “musicking.” The point is not to become a professional musician (it’s still possible.) The point is you, and your voice.
I made this quick video as a primer for getting started on your musicking adventure… who knows where it will lead?
Also, please comment and let me know how it went. With COVID lockdown and so little creative collaboration, jamming, dancing with others, etc etc, it would be so cool to hear from you and become aware of your existence.
Have fun.
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