Have you ever been in a place that was actually silent?
Probably not, if you were born anytime in the last century. The closest I’ve ever come to a place that was actually silent was on the coast of Cape Breton. A few places in northwestern Ireland came close.
In the prehistoric silence, the movement of vibrating sound waves through time would have an impact that we, with our air-handling systems, omnipresent traffic noise, and industrial yammering, cannot even comprehend. The mathematical relationship of two tones an octave or a fifth apart would shimmer in a way that was practically visible.
So it’s not really a surprise that music was held in such high regard, or that it seemed to be a good vehicle for the expression of feelings of sacredness or numinosity. It’s not surprising that music became the magic carpet on which memory sat, while sailing through hundreds of stanzas of epics, poems, lessons, genealogies, tribal histories.
But at some point in human history, the human ego became tangled up in the making of music, and thus began a sad trajectory:
Arbitrary judgment about various aspects of a performance became more important than the act of creativity;
the performer became more important than the performance;
the composer became more important than the performer;
and both the composer and the performer and the opinions of those who claimed to know something about “music” became more important than the music that was being created.
Thus did music become something to be adjudicated, commodified, argued about, fought over, and used to manipulate. As it was commodified, it became omnipresent. In the end, in the western world at least, this “movement of vibrating sound waves through time” became simultaneously devalued and turned it into a competitive sport that causes young kids to vomit with anxiety before a performance. It has become all about the musicians, who are alternately worshipped and treated with contempt, depending on the circumstance (or the skill of the publicist.)
I once had the privilege of spending a series of Saturday mornings with a wise and kind Tibetan monk who offered to teach a group of American students about Tibetan sacred chant. We learned by the “oral tradtion” method – he would sing the chant and we would sing it back to him. We Americans made fairly heavy going of it, trying to write it all down and struggling with ornaments that contained quartertones and melodic intricacies that were not part of our own musical experience. He was infinitely patient.
There were two or three of us who were professional musicians, and he was aware of this. At one point, as he was listening to each of us, he told me that I was very close to being right, but I had to add in the ornaments. I told him I felt quite shy about putting in the ornaments. He looked puzzled. “Shy?” he said. “Why?” I said, “Because I’m afraid I will get them wrong.” He threw back his head and laughed merrily, which puzzled me greatly. Then he leaned forward slightly, smiled, and shook his head. He looked directly at me, and in a quiet voice, with the kindest tone possible, he said “This not shy. This Big Ego.”
(zzzzing! goes Manjushri's sword.)
This was the single most effective teaching I have ever had regarding performance anxiety. It was also a teaching that unfolds further, like the petals of a lotus, as the years go by; one of the most profound teachings I have ever had on music in general.
We have taken “the movement of vibrating sound waves through time,” with their mathematical magic and their ineffable effect on the mind and the emotions, and we have somehow made it All About Us. Believe me, I am including myself in this – I’m no enlightened being. We use rehearsals to have tantrums and turf wars. We criticize other musicians because they don’t play like Us. We dismiss the hard work of other performers because they don’t happen to share Our Very Important Opinion of how music should sound, or whether it’s “authentic” or some other judgmental hogwash. We somehow convey to 10-year-olds that they are less than perfect human beings if they don’t play a piece of music like Yo-Yo Ma. We glorify the virtuoso and the famous over the sound of an old woman chanting her prayers.
We are a long, long way from the music of the spheres.
What would happen if we found a way to re-animate that “magic carpet?” What if we could somehow preserve the feeling that a 6-year old has when they first discover the big-wide-heart feeling that comes from making sounds with a musical instrument? What if we could somehow let music come through us like a transparent tube, or let the stories sing themselves using our mouths?
There are still performers who can do this - who can let go of Themselves and become living embodiments of the music, the story, or the song.
(Ben Bagby riding the Magic Carpet through the epic of Beowulf)
Some of them, including the bard pictured above, can also teach that way, and those of us who have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end are forever changed by it. Otherwise, if we can’t get outside our Selves, then our students won’t be able to get outside themSelves either. It’s our only hope. It’s what the late Zen master Katagiri Roshi meant when he said that when you teach, you must “take away the flag of ego.” Not the student’s ego – Yours. Mine.
