Success Through Comfortable Failure - Come Join the Band Wrapup

Come Join the Band - 2013 Wrap up (Success through Comfortable Failure)

For the past 3 years I have had the opportunity to coach a class on starting your own band through the University of Rochester’s Pre-College summer session.  Alan Murphy and I always have a great experience working with the high school students for “Come Join the Band: Creative Music Making for Everyone.” It’s always a great learning opportunity for us as teachers and performers to revisit our own formative learning time. Looking back on how we experienced learning an instrument for the first time or interacting with new band members is a great way to check in on how comfortable we are as professional performers and educators.  Facilitating the formative process of learning instruments and working as a band (in this case with members who have never even met and may have little to no music performance experience) is really profound. This step in the learning process (failure!) is something that can be really discouraging if you’re not used to it.  I know that I’ve had plenty of good and terrible experiences evaluating my drumming, composing, and singing (either as it happens or from a recording), and I think it was helpful to the students to know that everyone else in the band was there to support them. We all got to the point where we were comfortable talking about what was awesome and what could use some improvement--a big step than not even a lot of professional groups get to!

We kicked off the first of two weeks by learning a simple tune by ear. Everyone sang the bass line, lyrical melody, and patted/tapped the basic beat and beat division in our heels and hands--all at the same time!  You can see an example of this process on Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines In A Crusht Tin Box” in the IfCM video here from Montana (starts around 30 seconds in):

I demonstrated how the rhythm patterns directly related to playing a basic beat on the drum set and everyone tried it out.  This is usually learning “through failure moment #1”--drums are uncomfortably foreign at first, but then they get easier. Now that all of the students have a task that they currently are unable to do (play a rock beat on the drum set with all 4 limbs) we all practice it together with one person rotating to the drum set and the rest of us patting on our legs and tapping our heels on the ground. Everyone did a fantastic job listening to the pattern that they were playing and gradually making it more steady by the time they tried it on the drum set. Getting used to practicing rhythmic coordination away from an instrument like this is really dependent on your ability to listen carefully to the weight of your limbs and adjust them to the way that your ears perceive the groove. Listening critically to rhythmic interaction without the amplified sonic bombast of drums, cymbals, or even drum sticks, is really important in the learning sequence of becoming a competent musician.  It was great to see the students improve their listening skills as an ensemble through the weeks, and I think that their willingness to practice rhythmic coordination away from the instruments contributed to that.

We followed this presentation with similar hands-on demos by Alan (piano), special guest Kyle Vock (bass), and IfCM intern Ben Fang (guitar).

 [pic of Kyle with boys] We all worked with them on singing as a group and Alan, Kyle, and I had a chance to perform music that we regularly play as the Mighty High and Dry. The students shared a song or two that we pooled together to chose what we’d like to learn based on the difficulty, instruments available, and overall familiarity with the song.  We listened to a wide range of styles and artists including the Ben Folds Five, Muse, Los Lobos, contemporary gospel, and video game soundtrack music and settled on two songs to start:  “No One” by Alicia Keys and “Crushcrushcrush” by Paramour.  Lots of workshopping about how to listen for different instruments and building parts out of what you hear. 

Here's the completed result from a field trip session to GFI Music, a great professional recording studio in Rochester:

We are looking to stay involved with the students creative lives and hopefully offering a regular class to get them together with other like-minded musicians.  Stay tuned for more exciting youth creativity around Rochester!

- Chris Teal

Music, Traditions, Culture, and Appreciation

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.