Topic 208: Discords

Carol:

A Little Night Music

A chord is a combination of at least three tones or notes sounded at the same time, The dictionary also says that chords are usually “concordant” or harmonious. They “agree” with each other.  We have borrowed from the musical world to describe people as harmonious, or to describe situations as discordant, i.e. lacking in unity or harmony. I have spent enough time using daily themes to talk about the tragic discord of the Civil War, of the American Revolution, of the Vietnam era 60’s. Today, I prefer to write about music.
 

A few nights ago, our family went to a potluck followed by an evening of “musical play” with a local musician. He calls his programs “Music for Every Body” with a clear reason for separating that pronoun “everybody” into two parts. Prescott is full of accomplished musicians, artists, and actors who have gravitated to our mountain community. Jonathan Best seems to roll all those parts into one, and he lives up to his name. He is one of the best.... at making great music, at making people feel comfortable, and at showing people how to play in new ways through Playshops: “We all need a safe place to explore our music like a child.  When we talk we sing and when we walk we create rhythm" (source: Jonathan Best homepage)
 

Tuesday night, we played our musical bodies with  fourteen people of all ages outdoors in downtown Prescott in a circle, accompanied by what sounded like thousands of cicadas in the trees above us. Off in the distance we could hear band music playing from the square, just a typical summer evening in “Everybody’s Hometown.”  Jonathan started out with a little bit of teaching, not the pedantic rule-setting but more like rule-breaking. He shared his experiences with the Masai in Africa, where every body in a village sings and dances. Every body. Then he had us hit a note, our own personal note. Not to worry, Jonathan said. Not to worry about harmony in the traditional sense, i.e. chords with regular intervals based on our scale. There would be no wrong notes, no discord, just an incredible variety of sounds coming together in play.
 

Jonathon’s studio is called “The Music Garden. As the evening progressed and we moved on to trying out his suitcase full of musical instruments from all over the world, he helped us grow more confident as we experimented with musical sounds and unusual noise makers. It was great fun to watch my husband, who will never dance because somebody made fun of him when he was a teen-ager, who never sings in public probably for the same reason. Yet, there he was hitting his personal note, and then experimenting with a tiny accordion as part of an impromptu trio that included a train whistle and a finger harp.
 

In Jonathan Best’s Music Garden, there is not only room for “disharmony" but for silence; in his Music for Every Body playshops, there is room for silence as well as sound and for listening as well as performing. When he said that all the activities were optional, I took him at his word without feeling guilty or self-conscious. I chose to listen, which if done with intention and focus is also a form of participation.
 

By eight p.m. the band in the Square had quieted down and so had the cicadas. The fourteen musical bodies and their conductor, the Best conductor ever, stowed the instruments back in the big, old suitcase. Fourteen happy musical instruments put their chairs away and headed home. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-Long.
 

Sources:
Jonathan Best homepage.

Megan:

I'll show you optional...

The other night I attended a presentation by a local musician at the day-time hospitality center where my mother volunteers – Quixote’s Garage.  Once a month, there is a potluck followed by a talk of some kind. There have been presentations made on the death penalty, neo-natal care in developing nations, native American art. My mother gave a presentation on Women’s History Month.  I never, ever feel like going to these events at The Garage, but when I have a choice about whether or not to attend, it is always clear that not attending is the wrong choice. But they’re only once a month, the other people who go are interesting and invariably I do have a good time.

This week, I skipped the pot luck part to have dinner with a friend first so I arrived late, but while everyone was still eating. I was actually excited to hear this musician play because Dad said he performs in all the bars and is the best in town. I might have misunderstood that though, because it turns out the guy's last name is Best. Either way, I really enjoy live music, so I was relieved that I wasn’t so late that I was interrupting the performance. But when I sat down, my father turned to me and said, “It’s not going to be a show. It’s a proactive thing.” and he pointed to an open suitcase over flowing with instruments.

“Do you mean interactive?” I said. We both frowned. We feel the same way about these programs at The Garage, and an interactive musical event is very much not in our comfort zones. Immediately I started planning my exit. I was going to say that I felt sick from the meal I’d just eaten (this wasn’t a complete lie – I was uncomfortably full), and was only debating whether or not to throw my dad a bone and claim to be too ill to drive myself (thus getting him out as well), when suddenly the unbelievable happened.

We were sharing the table with a couple who were in town visiting their son and his fiancée (who volunteers at The Garage). We’d been chatting about diets (the father had recently lost 50 pounds), when the son came over and said, “I’m really not feeling well, must be something I ate – Dad can you drive me home?”   He totally stole my exit plan!

So, I had to stay. And so did my dad. The musician arranged us in a circle and we each got an instrument. Mom and Dad both chose maracas, and someone passed me a horn that made the same honking sound as a clown’s nose. I couldn’t play it without getting the giggles. AND the musician made us sing! He made us talk in gibberish and then sing the gibberish to people like we were having singing gibberish conversations. I have never been so incredibly uncomfortable and self conscious, although I did find that I enjoyed saying “hay bippity blibbity boo?”

In the beginning, Mr. Best told us that participation was optional, not to do anything we weren’t comfortable with, but I figured I had about the same choice there as I did to attend. And so Dad and I were standing there in the circle singing gibberish when I noticed someone was missing.

My mother.  She was sitting down outside the circle, hands clasped in her lap, and watching us all make complete asses of ourselves. I was like, Seriously?