60: (October 2024)
I had an experience this month that broadened my sense of music in unexpected ways. My daughter Bridget has been the sound engineer for a European-based experimental saxophonist and composer—Bendik Giske—for the past six years. I had only been to two of their concerts, since most have been a continent or two away, but I was able to attend the last one earlier this month, which was at Lincoln Center in NYC. At the concert, I was startled to realize that there was a distinct change in how I experienced the music.
Experimental music is fairly foreign to me in most ways. Since I didn’t grow up listening to anything like that, I’m guessing that my brain and ears became attuned to defining music in accordance with the well-worn pathways created by listening to largely tonal, western music with its dependable rhythms. Consequently, the first two times I attended a Bendik concert, I appreciated his musical ability and the sheer physicality of his performance, in which he does circular breathing for extended periods of time, but I felt a distance between me and the music. I was clearly a spectator in something I couldn’t quite grasp.
This last time was different though. Maybe something subconsciously clicked, and I stopped expecting the forms I had become so accustomed to throughout my life, allowing me to truly experience something new. I noticed what was going on musically in a way I hadn’t been able to before, and it felt liberating, as if I had shed some old musical skin and was trying on a brand new one. The best way I can describe the experience, metaphorically speaking, is that instead of observing the musical sound waves, I rode the waves, and experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom.
It also filled me with deep joy that my own musical journey was expanding because of my daughter’s work, not only with Bendik, but with her own experimental electronic music. Her own courage to grow and learn—and experiment so freely—inspires me to be more musically curious and open.
When I was in my late twenties, I lived in an apartment building that was directly across from the Lincoln Center concert hall where now, more than three decades later, I experienced this wonderful concert. Sound waves stretched across time and through generations, and here I was, listening to music in a wholly new way on this special night. And the waves washed over me.
40: (October 2004)
It took me 46 years to get to camp. I finally went this past summer and I loved it—five days and nights of sleepover camp, complete with bunk beds, in the lush Catskill Mountains in New York. It was a songwriting camp. A small mob of 75 people from all over the country gathered together to learn the art of making music. I slept three to four hours a night and was saturated in music the rest of the time.
We struggled all week to articulate our stories and emotions—our experiences of life—in that marriage of words and music. At the end of the week, the camp director explained how her developmentally disabled adult brother had convinced her to let him come to the camp a few years earlier. She had not had high expectations with regard to his writing ability, but to her surprise, he effortlessly wrote the lyrics to a song that they would later record.
The director played the song on her guitar to all of us who were sitting in a large circle around her at the close of our final workshop. Like many others there, I found myself weeping well before the song was over. There it was: a song of simple grace. A song that said what was important. Her brother had been able to see. He saw nature in its utter beauty, recognized the hand of the divine in its creation, and had gratitude for it.
Many of us wrote songs of loss and pain, focusing on what we do not have. This developmentally challenged man who did not have an easy path in life was able to see the glass not only half full, but overflowing. He wrote the lyrics that would become the song, Beautiful World.
I hope we all can enjoy even a few moments in such a state of peaceful gratitude for what is before us. It is, after all, a beautiful world.
60-40:
Music has a tremendous capacity to move us. It can serve as a vessel to express our emotions, help us overcome pain, energize us, calm us, and so much more. Musical possibilities are infinite, and with those possibilities are invitations to experience life differently, anew.
We can remain in well-worn grooves, like the needle going round on a vinyl record, but then we might miss out on unexpected, expansive experiences. I recommend stepping outside of the groove. Life is simply more fun and exciting when we are still capable of surprising ourselves!
60-40 