I haven't celebrated the 4th of July in the United States for three years, and whenever I find myself in another country on this day, I am a lot more patriotic than I am stateside.
The reason for this is simple: when I'm abroad I can celebrate the vision and ideals of this country without having to deal with all the people that just want to drunkenly blow things up to celebrate our nation's (violent) birth. I know kids aren't in school, so I can't sit 'em down and have a conversation with them about "what it all means," but it sure would be nice if, like Carl Wilson sings, we could pull together in hope and push each other to continue to make the USA better, striving to fulfill the ideals set out in our founding documents, guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to ALL our citizens.
Brothers sisters stand firmly and try
Reaching the spacious skies
Fourth of July
It's a classic Carl cut, a sweet and beautiful song.
At my age, I'm stuck smack-dab in the middle of the my-entire-library-is-on-my-hard-drive and vinyl-sounds-best movements, and while I love having portable music (I use Pandora at work, and take my 2nd generation iPod shuffle on vacations) I prefer vinyl. Yes, this preference has to do with sound and the aesthetic of a physical format, but it also has to do with my desire as a human being to interact physically with art.
I know it might seem a bit laughable-- records were mass-produced after all-- but there is still a physical component to lps: I can see the grooves where the physical waves of the music were imprinted, the visible version of the pressure music exerts on the body. I can see where songs change drastically, I can feel the silent spaces between songs with my fingers as I clean my records.
I feel the same way about books; borrowing my friend's Kindle to read a book was a disappointing experience. I missed the sensation of turning pages, of being able to see how many pages I'd read, how many I had left. It took me longer to read the book and felt less substantial. On the Kindle every font was the same, everything black and gray, a shadow world of the soul of books in their physical form. No human being will ever be able to touch a digital book, there is no history of human contact, there are no signs of past reading or cherishing.
Why is this so important? So what? It saves money and probably a few trees. (It doesn't save jobs in local shops, but that is another article. I suggest you go here for a great blog discussion on why buying music [and books for that matter] is important.)
Irises by Van Gogh
I will never forget standing in front of a Van Gogh painting of Irises at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and seeing the brushstrokes in the paint, imagining the artist's hand and eyes at work, his posture as he paused to see what was coming to life before him. The painting was not the two-dimensional thing I had always understood it to be-- it was lumpy, some spots raised up with multiple layers of paint, others showing the turn of the brush or a correction of a previous mark laid down.
Why should I settle for a "3D" experience of a sculpture or painting on Google-Whatever if I can ever have the chance to see it in person? Imagining the artist staring at a piece of marble (or any other material) and conjuring a being forth is much more awe-inspiring that the distance the computer screen puts between us.
When we allow the distance technology creates to be at the center of our lives, we are losing out. I still remember the excitement I felt as a pre-schooler when we had our weekly "mystery" tactile activity. The teacher brought an object to class in a paper bag and every student stretched out their hand in order to feel it, interact with it, try to guess the object's identity. Everything else I remember from pre-school is pretty expressionistic, but boy, I remember that paper bag.
Teaching students who are BFFs with 2D experiences of life (friendships conducted through texts, all the most interesting sights on the 2" screens of their cell phones) I've found they are not immune to the mystery bag activity, or hands-on art-- in fact, these activities are the ones that bring that magical, elusive light of learning to their eyes. These activities are becoming as rare as White Tigers in young people's TV and electronic filled lives. Our culture is losing the knowledge of how to touch anything other than a keyboard or a screen (and students are losing their ability to manually write, spell, and who needs it anyway with Siri? Welcome illiteracy! Spellyng doznt hav 2 b standrdzd ineemor-- wut iz a printyng pres?).
The physical experience of buying/listening/playing music doesn't stand alone from how we interact with art in general. Technological experiences and conveniences shouldn't be at the expense of human interaction with an object. My romance with the Platonic, abstract ideal has ended. Put me in a room with the physical thing 'cause a hard drive full of music just won't cut it.
The Blogspot dictionary defines music as: "The art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both)
to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion."
This week I challenged my 7th grade music appreciation class to create definitions for "music." Most of them have only been exposed to highly commercial tunes, so it's painfully easy to challenge their notions of what qualifies something as music. Even the wrinkle that a song might be good though it's not in their personal taste is a bit of a revelation.
One of the pieces I played for students (and you can view my entire playlist at the end of this entry), is the song "4:33" by John Cage. My own experience with the song, as a freshman taking a history of the blues class, was not dissimilar to what I experience in my classroom when I play the song. See what you think (if you haven't viewed it before) before reading on. This is just one example I pulled from youtube; it's been performed by many.
My peers simultaneously experienced disbelief and annoyance. Was this a joke? It had to be! I was confused too, but I wanted to figure out what was happening, and I thank my high school English teachers for making me reach so hard for subtext. I heard instrumentalists practicing down the hall, a saxophonist repeating the same bits of a song over and over until they got it right, birds singing outside the windows of the classroom, the buzz of the tv monitor, my classmates angry whispers.
"They missed the point. There’s no
such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they
didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear
the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second,
raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people
themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked
out."
This is a song that invites the listener to pay attention to the life, the music that is around them. Every time this song is played it is different, unique to each listener. This song has more lives than the Gallifreyan Doctor, and it perplexes and compels, knows something the listener doesn't know.
It would be all too easy to scoff at this "4:33", to ignore the questions it's asking about the very nature of music. Like Cage, I subscribe to the notion that music has always existed-- will continue to exist-- that the rustling of the leaves was the first applause, the rhythm of the heartbeat the first 4/4 time signature. When I play "4:33", I delight in stopping and hearing what I usually miss. And, to be truthful, every time I share this with a new group of students I delight in watching them struggle to comprehend what is happening.
Below is the music of my mini listening lesson. While the purpose is to help students clarify a personal definition of music, it is quite self-indulgent. Because I spend a great deal of time listening to music students love, I use this rare opportunity to play music I love. The first one's a doozy -- and one of my favorite songs of all time!
1. "Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City" - Yoko Ono
2. "Search and Destroy" - The Stooges
3. 4'33" - John Cage
4. "Judy is a Punk" - The Ramones
5. "Weeping Wall" - David Bowie
6. "Hong Kong Garden" - Siouxsie and the Banshees
