Without music to decorate it..
“Music isn’t fragile. Music has been around as long as people have formed communities. It’s not going to go away, but it uses and meaning evolve. I am moved by more music now than I have ever been.”- David Byrne from his How music works
I am sitting there with a book, waiting for my daughter to complete her piano exam (It’s a top parenting tip by the way, always have a book in the car for the pick up’s and waiting, there is always waiting!) and thinking about the importance of music.
In her book ‘You are the music’, the music psychologist Victoria Williamson, explores the role that music plays in our personal, emotional and social development. She also highlights the role that a parent can play:
A regularly present and consistently supportive parent may not be able to advise directly on the technical aspects of playing or practise but their presence is eventually worth its weight in gold.
Victoria continues explaining that
In time, as self regulation, internal motivation and effective deliberate practice strategies develop, both parents and music teachers will be able to take a step back and the child will emerge with all the right sustainable tools to push themselves through their education as far as they desire.
Thinking to myself about this and how my daughter is growing up as she continues to push her musical journey and how far she has come in her progression, but much more importantly how she now actually enjoys it.
More memories came back to me while I continue to wait and I remember attending an informal piano recital which she was taking part in with an audience of parents and siblings who were all there in support. It was in a class room in a school with 40–50 people of all ages and children from 6–11 years, playing an arrangement of pieces under their music teachers guidance, to raise money for charity and give the students a chance to play for the first time in front of people. The children were terrific, I mean everyone was a beginner and they just sat down, took their turn and played a few songs on the piano. No warm up practice, they just went straight ahead and played without hesitation with real enjoyment. But what was really remarkable was the effect a piece such as ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’ has on a room of happy people, I mean you could physically feel the melancholy and I was wondering at the time how extremely powerful this was and how as humans we sense that.
In a BBC documentary, How Music Makes Us Feel, this topic was explored when Professor Michael Spitzer, explained how an artist like Adele, uses emotion to such effect and how the listener ends up with that conflicting happy/sad feeling at the same time.
Brian Eno said once “music emanates from parasympathetic rather than sympathetic impulses” and I thought how very interesting that was. More research “has revealed that music holds the keys to your body’s pharmacy, and can promote or suppress the release of these chemicals”
This is also why I firmly believe in the democratisation of music, I have spoken to all sorts of music people, from musicians, engineers, music tech folks to other fans, about why we need more creative people, and I don’t mean everyone needs to be in a band but we do need the next generation remaining interested in music and taking that creativity interest forward into possible future positions of influence, in future employment where even if they are not directly in the music industry, they can help continue to foster the importance of worthwhile creative arts projects.
It is one of the reasons that I helped out on festivals, like MusicTechFest who embrace that ethos wholeheartedly. Through MusicTechFest, I encountered a whole community of passionate music enthusiasts, just one example is David Plans who explained about merging healthcare and entertainment.
David told an incredible positive story, in a fascinating presentation, on how he took inspiration from his own heart attack experience to create BioBeats to create apps like Hear and Now, a mindful breathing app that measures your heartbeat for iOS and Android.
In his terrific article, The Streaming Music Conundrum, Dave Allen, who has been consistently writing about the fate of music and the artists that create it, frames what it means to so many of us music fans:
Music is not some kind of 'product,' nor is it a good that sits on a store shelf to be 'consumed.' Nor is it 'content.' It is art.
With that, the door opens and my daughter emerges breathing a sigh of relief, another exam over time to go back to work and school.
