Bidden or unbidden...
Dear readers, something strange happened the other week. Subscribers of Pride & Practicing fell prey to a strange phenomenon and might not have known what hit them. First of all, we were presented with a seemingly unplayable chunk of musical notation. Then we were asked to apply our practice tools to it… ouch! Did we lose heart? Did we get discouraged, just decide these practice tools are not up to the job? Did we think to ourselves, Rachel has gone off the deep end now? Or did we just scratch our heads and think, what was that?
Did we know what day it was?
Also, did we click on the audio at the end? Alright, okay, that may or may not have helped, because a) first of all, it is now possible to include audio here on the Substack platform, but only as a podcast episode, which I recognize is cumbersome; and also, perhaps even more so, b) there was this strange phenomenon at play. We may have not recognized this music even if we heard the audio, and/or we may have moved through our lives up to this point blissfully unaware of the strange phenomenon….
What if there were a piece of music that kept cropping up wherever you went? What if lurked under every rock, jumped out at you from behind every door, fell out of the closet on your head when you went to get your umbrella? How would you like that? Is there a piece like that in your life? If not: if you were to have such a piece, what piece would you like it to be? How different our lives would be, if that piece were, say, the Schubert G-flat major Impromptu; or the Schoenberg Suite op. 25 (dear readers, I just heard Yuja Wang play that live in Seattle recently, among MANY other things—there were eight encores—and as a follow-up to our previous conversations, I will simply observe that perhaps I was wrong; perhaps she is superhuman after all); or some simpering song from the Lion King that we loathe with every fiber of our musical being? What if it were something vast and all-encompassing that kept leaping out at us? (I recently heard Mahler’s sixth symphony in performance, too….) That would be exhausting! What if it were the saddest piece in the world (whatever that might be)? What would that do to us? What if it were the Aria from the Goldberg Variations? How would our lives be, if any of these pieces decided to dig in their heels with us, and revealed themselves out of every nook and cranny, bidden or unbidden?
Bidden or unbidden, music is here! What if it were something ridiculous? What if it were a third-rate pop song by Rick Astley?
Dear readers, I know that Pride & Practicing is probably the last place you expected to be Rick-rolled, but that is what has happened. I regret to inform you. See here and here to understand how it is that Pride & Practicing has joined the ranks the Oregon State Legislature, the New York Mets, the White House Twitter feed, and Nancy Pelosi’s cat-cam in this ongoing, society-wide project of mischief. We have Ari to thank for it. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55468/11-epic-rickrolls Those who have been living in happy innocence, oblivious under this particular rock, can now emerge into the daylight. Forewarned is fore-armed.
All pranking aside, the point remains that when we, practicers of the world, are faced with something daunting, such as the notation with which we were assaulted last time, we need our practice tools!
And when we dig in, using our tools, counting even the most deranged time signatures out loud, things begin to fall into place. We recognize patterns; we find some sounds and gestures we can latch onto; eventually—EVENTUALLY—the “hard” becomes “easy,” or at least less ridiculously hard…… We discover that practicing works. I hope none of you gave it enough time to really find that out on last week’s example, though. If you did, you’re probably not reading this now, because you have unsubscribed.
And the idea still tantalizes: shared musical experience! In different times and places, any person on the street, from any walk of life, could and would whistle the themes of Italian operas as they worked…. Any listener of any stripe, at certain specific times and places, would have known the difference between the exposition and the recap in their bones. What does it say about us that now, evidently, what we’ve got is Never Gonna Give You Up? Oh, don’t answer that. It says lots of things! One: that people are funny. Sometimes. And that is (sometimes) a good thing! Another, that we don’t have to all whistle the same tunes, and THAT is a good thing too! What would you like the Rick-roll to be, for you? Go ahead, look for the Aria from the Goldberg Variations in the back of your cupboards and on the shelves of the grocery store. Find it outdoors, in the backyard, in the mountains, in the wind at the beach. Let your favorite ear-worm, your chosen ear-worm, really get in there for awhile, and let it do its work on you. Don’t hide from it. We don’t share all our musical tastes, or our musical tunes, with everyone else in this world, but we’re all here, we’re alive, and bidden or unbidden, music is present.
Happy practicing! I hope you can forgive me (and Ari) for that last one. I hope you knew what day it was.