No-tes

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It amazes me to see and hear experienced musicians playing the piano with such flexibility and skill. They're so accomplished in their technique it causes me to feel clumsy. It hasn't really gotten any better since I've learned to play the Major and minor scales on my digital piano. It helps me to appreciate their craft, and usually, like with others I've heard, it makes me wish I had started sooner.

I've known about how learning and playing the scales daily helps a person play any instrument better for a long time, but I never acted like it was so until recently. I play several instruments of various kinds by memory or by heart, but I'm not an expert on playing any of them in the classical sense. I can, however, play simple tunes on them in such a way as to arouse the same emotions in a listener as more accomplished musicians, but that gift is not always on call like it is for a trained professional.

As with all the instruments I've encountered in the past, the more I attempt to play any particular instrument, the better I understand how difficult it is for the musicians I witness performing to do what they do if I do it too. It doesn't matter that I'm a rank amateur who shouldn't be mentioned in the same room with the masters. I don't have to know what they know to more deeply empathize with what they're doing. Fortunately, neither does anyone else.

I didn't last long studying the piano in the third grade with Richard's aunt whose brother was a famous writer. Mercury in Aries. My mind wouldn't accept instruction from her. It had it's own goals for the time, and it had more to do with learning how to communicate face to face with other people than it did through a musical instrument.

In the sixth grade I wheedled my parents into buying me a cornet. I wanted a trumpet, but the cornet costs less, and we were poor, and I was lucky to get that. My father was right. It was a waste of his precious money. We were living pretty much hand-to-mouth as a family, and so my cornet cost everybody in the family what it took to purchase the trumpet.

The big problem for me was reading sheet music. It's like I refused to do it. I could listen to the person next to me play what we were supposed to be playing, and play the same thing, with feeling, from heart. Why would I bother to read music if I could easily imitate someone who could? It's been that way for three billion years since I first arrived on Earth as a mustard seed.

I brought my music with me. I am IS my music, and my music is me. What more is there to deny? What more is there to say "No!" to. What more is their to know? How else do we grow than through what we gnow?

My main musical instrument is voice. I had always rather have sang than to express myself musically any other way using any other implement. The fact that music can only be sung using the vowels completely intrigued me the first time I be-co-me-d with it.

Sometime I think the rain taught me to sing. It's raining now. Really raining. Maybe two inches of rain in this one passing shower. It's dark outside the wide-open door to my second-floor deck. It's thundering and lightning and I hear a church bell ringing through the cacophony of noise. It made me wonder if the church steeple had been struck by a bolt of lightning?

It rang twice at seven minutes past eleven o'clock in the morning, and stopped, and has since then kept it's stopping still. But the rain hasn't stopped nor barely slowed down. A week ago the weathermen were worried about a big drought that would dominate their fanciful descriptions of what happens 7/24 and reduce it to the same ol'/same ol'.

I stood up and walked over to look out the door at the galvanized pail my neighbors bought me as a gift. It has at least six inches of water in it. That means it's rained a couple of inches or more in the last twenty minutes. It's still pouring down. It's like the expression I heard as a child. It's "set in", this rain has. It's set in for the day.

The fact that only the vowels can be "sung" and not the consonants in a very powerful tidbit of info about singing and music. I guess my finally realizing this true thing had a more powerful impact on me than maybe for many others.

My unfortunate musical mentors had been trying to get me to understand this for a long time. Several of them literally got so frustrated they yelled and screamed at me because otherwise I had a good voice. There was just one thing wrong. They didn't know how I envisioned the "vocal cords" in my mind's eye. I was trying to get something that wasn't there to do what they told me.

I kind of think this was their fault, yet at the same time I realize their coming to know that might require more interest and dedication to their job than they were willing to give. I didn't exactly show up on their doorstep with letters of recommendation. I straggled in like something the cat laid at their feet.

The speech coach's name who did realize I had a problem in visualization is Helen Steers. My affection for her knows no bounds. I even know my affection for her was/is genuine appreciation for her taking the time to get me over the hump with my difficulty.

One day she told me to come to her office after class. Her doing that wasn't so unusual. She was on the faculty of the Drama and Speech Department and I was a Drama and Speech Major, and many of the professors were like that toward their department major students.

I followed her around the corner to her office and started to sit down next to her desk, but she stopped me and told me to follow her into an inner office that she used for storing her teaching supplies. I'd never been invited into her inner sanctum before, so I was avidly looking around and taking it all in.

She approached a plastic model of the human head and told me to watch her take it apart. It didn't take long to get to the throat of the model, and all the parts of the throat, including the "vocal cords". Without saying a word she disassembled the various parts of the plastic model's vocal cords, lifted each part to show it to me, laid it down, and then took out the next part to hold it up significantly, then she put it back together, and told me it was my turn, and left the room to sit at her desk.

I've always had a good mechanical touch. I disassembled and reassembled the plastic model several times, and kept doing it until she said she had another class to go teach. We never discussed what happened for me in her office, but it was noticeable to me that she called on me to read from scripts in front of her classes more frequently. We both knew what I got from it.

After she helped me to understand my misperception about how the vocal cords worked and what they looked like it was everything I needed to know to remember what my earlier voice teacher had been attempting to teach me. I perform some of the exercises they taught me even now. I still don't blame them for not getting to the root of my problem. I kind of think it's because they were musicians who matriculated to teaching their craft, and Doctor Steers was a speech therapist.

Sometime I write about a certain kind of person I encounter seemingly serendipitously throughout my life. Back when I was a homeless bum on the road doing my go-ye-therefore- spirit quest I would meet this sort of person when I was truly at my wit's end with chronic fatigue and hunger. I would go days and weeks with out food or sleep. Then, one of these people would show up and prop me up for a couple of days until they thrust me once more into the breech. God hates a vacuum.
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