Why I'm Not Much of a Music Fan

[Lightning Rod]

I've never been much of a music fan. This might seem like a strange statement coming from a person who has subsisted for a good deal of his life by being a professional musician. The operative word is 'fan.' or at least my private definition of the term, 'music fan.'

I love music. Music is a huge part of my life. I have spent amounts of time and effort in my dedication to the art which many would call extravagant and some would say was foolish or obsessed. The first few years of my flute career saw me practicing 8-10 hours per day. If anyone doubts the transformative potential of such an activity, I invite them to spend even one hour inflating air-mattresses or blowing out birthday candles. This was all part and parcel of a more encompassing yoga of personal discovery aimed at perfection in small things. Flute-playing is a chance to combine Hatha and Prana and Raja yogas in one activity. It requires discipline of body, breath and mind. But that is a separate subject from music.

Music is such a vast and general subject that it becomes difficult to use the word with any degree of exactness or particularity. One man's music is another man's noise and everyone has his own individual level of engagement with and appreciation of music. Of the arts, music is probably the most fundamental. Certainly it is the first or earliest human language that we encounter in life starting with the basic drumbeats of our mother's hearts. The first thing that we remember in this incarnation is when our own hearts are tiny pulsing globs of jell-o and they join our mother's hearts in that fond duet which pounds the cadence of generations. When we are born we are greeted by the music of our mother's crooning moans. All god's chillren got rhythm. A child needs to know absolutely nothing about music to get the full benefit of a nursery song.

So, why am I not a music fan? Other than my native elitist attitude, it probably has something to do with my definition of 'music fan.' In strict translation, a 'fan' is a fanatic. In this sense I suppose I am a fan. But in common usage, being a music fan means that you are a consumer of music. You buy recordings, tickets to concerts and performances, listen to radio, watch music videos, have favorite artists (music brands) and styles of music, and read Rolling Stone. In this sense I am not a fan. In my entire life I have purchased a total of two record albums and one CD and I lost those or gave them away. Most of the concerts that I've seen were observed from the wings or on comp tickets. I was more likely to be playing music in nightclubs than going there to listen to it. I'm not a music consumer. Long before the internet I looked at music the same way I look at sex, there is too much of it out there for free to seriously consider paying for it.

I have said, mostly in jest, that becoming a musician is what ruined music for me. I started my journey as a musician rather late in life, in my early twenties. Oh, I had learned music in school. I knew how to read notes. I had been in the band and orchestra but I had no particular commitment to it; it was just another subject in school. I am thankful for this early training because it gave me the the basics of the language but like many things that we learn in school, its value was not apparent to me at the time. When I became quickened as a musician, my whole relationship with music changed suddenly. I can't describe it in any other way but with a religious analogy. It was like being born again or transformed.

On the mundane physical plane, this transformation was accomplished by means of 500 milligrams of organic mescaline. This was no namby-pamby LSD cut with Nestle's Quik that is commonly sold as mescaline on the black market. I knew the people who had picked this peyote in the South Texas desert and hauled it to Austin in burlap bags and soaked it in their benzine bathtubs and harvested the long clear crystals of mescaline hydrochloride. This wasn't street dope, it was hallelujah in a double-ought capsule, epiphany in a pill, made by devoted hands for sacramental purposes only. You wouldn't want to eat this stuff and go to a Grateful Dead concert although I'm sure you would be well taken care of there. It's a no-business-as-usual type of experience. Anyway, a capsule of this was on the menu of my eucharist one Easter Sunday. That was the day I met Mescalito.

There was just enough natural strychnine left in the mescaline to intensify the colors and the jagged Navaho patterns always prominent in the peyote experience. As I was tasting the technicolor undersides of my eyelids, I heard a sub-sonic rumbling of footsteps and then a voice so deep that I was hearing it with my lungs, not my ears. In awe and self-defense, I mentally draped a symbol over this un-knowable energy like a cape to give some shape to the spirit present beneath. The myth of Mescalito described in the Don Juan books was a likely garment. He is the totem god of peyote. His head is a green peyote bud with many eyes. He is huge and stern and fearsome. In my vision. Mescalito approached me and being the kind-but-strict zen teacher that he is, he whacked me on the head with his bamboo stick. Only it wasn't a stick, it was a flute. Then he handed me the flute and said, 'Here, kid. Figure this pipe out.' Those were his only words.

I had to take him seriously considering there were crystals falling from the sky and an angelic chorus of electric guitars was screaming in my ears like Carlos Santanna in a parthenon of mirrors. In short, it was a profound experience. Somehow I obtained or was given a silver flute. I still don't know where it came from, but I began to play it. My first instrument was the clarinet and I had noodled around on recorders and saxophones, so wind instruments were not completely foreign to me, but the transverse flute had always been somewhat of a puzzle to me. I looked at it as a girl's instrument to begin with because most of the flute players I had met were girls. Girls are encouraged to play it in school since it's lady-like, you don't blow directly into it, and it's light to carry in marching band. Flute players also have the best lips in the band, but that's another story. I had fiddled around with the instrument several times but had never been able to get a proper tone out of it, it was a paradox to me, like women, they called it a reed instrument but it had no reed. But suddenly that day it made sense to me. I put the horn to my lips and blew and music came out. Simple. From that day forward, my relationship with music was changed. I could no longer passively enjoy it. It was like I had walked through a mirror. I was no longer just a fan, I was a player.

So, I spent the next three years of my life with my chin joined to the headpiece of a flute, trying to figure the pipe out. I literally wore several flutes out from the acid in my skin eating the plating off the horns. And I thought about music in a different, more analytical way. I couldn't listen to music without dissecting its parts and observing which elements worked and trying to explain why tears came to my eyes from some songs and others would rouse my feet to dance. Why does a major chord uplift your soul while a minor one is mysterious and intimate? Why does a flatted fifth give you the blues? You don't need to answer any of these questions or even ask them to be a music fan. You only need to ask them if you understand music as the spiritual language that we use to converse with god.

It is not necessary to believe in god any more than we need to believe in anything that is self-evident. We don't need to believe that the sky is blue or that water is wet. The hum of energy that pervades the universe hums right along whether we believe in it or not, whether we can hear it or not. Music is one of the small ways that we can participate in that big vibration not only by tuning ourselves like instruments or radios to receive and resonate with the frequencies but also by adding our own voices to the chorus. This is why I call it conversing with god.

I know, I know, I'm taking the whole music thing too seriously. That's why I'm not much of a music fan, any more than a Christian theologian would describe himself as a Jesus Fan or a Muslim cleric would say he was a Fan of Mohammed. It just sounds too frivolous and faddish and fleeting, temporary devotion like the posters on a teenager's bedroom wall. I don't care what flavor of music you are devoted to any more than I care which face of god you worship. I don't care if you are tone-deaf or atheist either. You can be a fan of rock music or country music or jazz or classical, you can like gospel music or devil music, mountain music or valley music or water music or air or earth music. Those are all just minor variations of locale, taste and occasion. No style or genre is greater or holier or more or less refined than another.

This is not to say that all music is good. In fact much of it is tedious, banal, distracting, annoying and possibly downright evil. This is another reason why I'm not much of a music fan. So much popular music is the sonic equivalent of high-fat fast-food. It charms you with cheap, salty hooks and then collects in your arteries like the vague premonition of a heart attack. Pop music gets stamped out like tater-tots with as much uniformity and predictability. It can be an insult to silence. There is not a genre of popular music that is innocent of this. They all become pablum parodies of themselves. Country music is the best example of this melted similarity followed closely by Rock which even Sting calls the most Nazi of all musical forms, and Rap which is a marvel of non-melodic boredom. Even Jazz keeps its own Sunday School.

What I'm really not a fan of is the superficiality of fan-dom. I've never liked being called a 'consumer' in any context. Just the word brings to mind a picture of some gelataneous blob which absorbs things with a sucking, slurping sound. It's not attractive. To think about being a consumer of music is just insulting. I don't consume music, I create music. A song exists even after I listen to it or play it. Nothing is consumed or used up or depleted. In ideal cases, something is added.

Many times those who describe themselves as music fans are actually not fans of music at all and in fact know almost nothing about music. They are actually fans of pop culture or fans of fashion or fans of whatever is the newest big thing. They may be fans of a particular artist or group and be able to recite their whole discography and the lyrics to all of their songs. These people often collect recordings and T-shirts and posters and other products related to their idols. All of these involvements have very little to do with music, they are more about lifestyle and fashion and marketing. The music business is much more concerned with business than with music. That's another reason why I'm not much of a music fan, you can ruin almost any kind of music by trying to make it into a product.

[Arcadia]

I guess I understand... I´m not also an education fan...! Nicely written, enjoy your gift!!!!!!!

[judih]

Your incredible explanation of how you got your flute is masterful/masterly (can't decide which),
but then along comes the line:
"Music is one of the small ways that we can participate in that big vibration not only by tuning ourselves like instruments or radios to receive and resonate with the frequencies but also by adding our own voices to the chorus."

what else needs to be said?

[mtmynd]

A good piece you've written here, eLRod... as they say on the border "me gusta!"

I've always enjoyed music but had little interest in playing an instrument. This was a discovery that came with piano lessons when I was 8, maybe 9 years old... the most boring time with a teacher who insisted on me playing the scales with the metronome clicking away hypnotically moment after moment until I thought I would scream in agony at doing this practice for the umpteenth time. In high school, after opening the door to jazz, I was transfixed by the sounds I eagerly listened to with each new recording I purchase when I had the money to do so... I thought I could be an amazing saxophone player and insisted on taking those high school music class lessons. I had to have a tenor sax. They were the ones that I admired the most. I was absolutely clueless how difficult it would be to blow even the mousiest of a note from the brilliant instrument. I struggled with it lesson after lesson until I found that I would never be the musician I had pictured myself to be one day. I was much better suited to playing recordings of music... music that stretched my imagination east and west, north and south and all places in between.

Gawd! how I loved the places music took me... the most inspirational of the arts and the one art that I was not so surprised to learn, inspired many other artists. I don't know how many art-types I have spoken with over the years and when asked if they listen to music while creating their chosen art, the answer is, indeed, a resounding 'yes.' As you so well stated, (music) "is the first or earliest human language that we encounter in life starting with the basic drumbeats of our mother's hearts."

[Lightning Rod]

Interesting reflections, Cec

I've been grappling with my thoughts about music in the process of working on my memoir. The subject of music's influence on the other arts is a fascinating one. I have also talked to many and varied artists and musicians about this. Visual artists often enjoy music while working. And dancers of course, but I've met choreographers who preferred to work in silence. Musicians are listening to music as they play it of course, but you wouldn't want to be working on one piece of music and listening to another. Do you see what I mean? Most musicians enjoy listening to music for entertainment or relaxation and the same reasons everyone else enjoys it, but with some differences such as noticing technical details and musicianship more than the layman would. I look at myself as a writer first and a composer second and a musician third. When I write, I don't care what music is playing unless it's something that I want to hear and then I stop writing and listen instead. I prefer to have the television going in the background as I write. When I compose I want silence or ambient noise with the only tonality and rhythm coming from me. When I'm playing music I like to be playing with musicians who are better technicians than I am. I always say that it is my ambition to be the worst player on the stage.

It's hard to think about music. It is much easier to simply enjoy music. Sometimes being a musician can take some of the mystery and amazement out of music for me because I'm not as likely to be impressed by cheap tricks because I know how cheap they are. I suppose there are a significant number of teenaged girls who think that the Jonas Bros are good musicians while I doubt that they have anything to do with music at all. My pal Butch (eugeneherman) has a way of thinking about audiences of music. "You've gotchur 5% and yer 95%. Five percent of a typical audience knows a little something about music and could spot a mistake in your technique or intonation. The other 95 per cent don't know squat about music and couldn't care less about yer tech-fuckin'-neek, they just want the beat to be there and the singer to be pretty."

Sorry about your early music abuse. I think there are some music teachers who should be arrested for poisoning experience for their victims. It's like cruel potty training because it can leave you twisted for life. When I was a kid, my next-door neighbor was a 'prodigy' on the piano. He was a year younger than me and I remember his sad forlorn face as he looked out his window during his forced practice and saw the rest of us playing football in the yard. His mother made him practice incessantly and even when he wasn't practicing he couldn't play ball with us for fear of damaging his frail and talented fingers. I always felt very sorry for him. I have met him on numerous occasions during my musical career, not him but grown versions of him in other musicians who had been tortured with musical training as children. They have often been greatly troubled people and as musicians, no better than their non-prodigy fellows.

I rattle on about the subject but I guess it's as it should be that most people are fans or listeners of music and fewer are players. Like I always say, "Music's happy as long as there is someone to play it and someone to listen."

[SadLuckDame]

I love music, I don't know a jig about it, but I like beat and lyric, also a lot of passion, emotion and even tears are good, thinking Janis, thinking Dylan, thinking Jerry...etc.

But, I need that silence for writing. I need a 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. when the world is practically dead and I sit questioning it's existence. Music has a habit of making boundary. I need an Ocean, it may have an end, but I couldn't swim to it before my death or drowning.

A good subject here, Lrod.