When I was in high school, my violin teacher suggested I learn a piece by Toru Takemitsu. I’m not sure really what led him to this idea, but since I am of Japanese descent - and was, at the time, interested in learning more about my family’s culture - I thought, why not?
Although it’s arguably one of the more standard-sounding works of his violin/piano pieces, learning “Distance de Fée” was a challenge. (Perhaps at the time I was just naive and narrow-minded when it came to music. It was probably the case.) I was working with a pretty different aesthetic, a different facet of expression and representation, and feeling very far away from the more... predictable, let’s say, music that I had learned up until then. There wasn’t exactly a coherent structure - when I first heard the piece, it sounded to me more like a collection of sketches rather than one piece of music - and when learning the piece by myself without the piano, it made no sense what direction I should be moving in, where the climax of the piece was supposed to be. Not that there were no instructions - the page was littered with markings for dynamics. Perhaps because not every phrase could be shaped through intuition alone.
It’s interesting - almost because there were more instructions, I had to meet them with more creativity. There was so much meaning in each marking, so I had more to “translate,” if you will. I had to replace what was instinctive in other pieces with more calculated planning. As a result, the process of learning the piece was simultaneously very cerebral and yet entirely emotional. I had to think very carefully about what I was doing. But those thoughts had to come first from emotion or imagery - perhaps even more so than from the ink on the page - or else I would only end up mechanically trying to input ink and spit out sounds. Not convincing, not interesting. Not music.
Through learning Takemitsu, I learned the real meaning of timing. I learned what it really means to breathe and to let the music breathe. Sometimes, getting to the note is not as important as how you get there. I would wager that I’ve become, overall, a better musician for it - for having had my creativity, my sense of musicality and emotionality tested. Learning the piece also caused me to appreciate Takemitsu’s music more (which then led me to learn another one of his pieces, “Hika”), as well as sparked my interest in listening to music using traditional Japanese instruments and understanding more about Japanese aesthetics.
Music is one of the things that virtually every culture has in some shape or form, which is a pretty cool thing for mankind, if you ask me. But because there are so many different types of music, approaches to music, and conceptions about music, there is so much we can learn from moving outside our zones of familiar music and branching out into different areas. From Takemitsu, I realized that sometimes there isn’t a climax or easily plottable structure in a piece, that sometimes music sounds like water that has been scooped up from an ever-flowing river, as if one were experiencing only a mere sliver of something infinitely vast - and creating that atmosphere is something that takes both considerable thought and emotion. That the more “directionless” something may sound, the more valuable each note becomes as it passes, beautiful in its own right rather than for its role in leading us to different soundscapes.
The meaning of music to people of different cultures naturally differs. For the professional circles of Japanese nagauta shamisen players, learning music is about preserving a long tradition, like a museum for sounds - students work carefully to preserve and mimic even the precise movements of their teachers. On the other hand, those in the contemporary Finnish folk music community emphasize the importance of the creative, ever-changing, living aspect of their genre against an expectation of preserved tradition. Gambian children are immersed in a musical environment from early on and everyone can become a performer in their own right, but in our own American culture, there seems to be a pervasive idea that only those who can duke it out on American Idol are those who should become professional singers.
Because of such differences, perhaps it’s difficult - or even close to impossible - to fully understand such varied and nuanced meanings in anything but a superficial manner, as outsiders. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to take away from learning or being exposed to music of different cultures or traditions. On the contrary, I think we can learn a lot by not only learning and listening to music from other places, but also by informing ourselves of ideas about music and the processes of music making as well. And I’m definitely not alone in this idea.
Like other occasions when we come into contact with cultures different from our own, cross-cultural collaboration in music can lead to deeper insight and creativity. It makes us see our own traditions from a different perspective, to notice things we didn’t see before because we previously took them for granted. Stepping outside of the borders can help to open up our eyes. If we learn more from each other, not only do we enrich each others’ musical lives and maybe even come to a better cultural understanding of each other, but we also eliminate so much of the need to reinvent the wheel any time we want to think of different ways to think about learning, teaching, playing, performing, and appreciating music.
No comments:
Post a Comment