Sometimes, honestly, despite the fact that nothing bad has happened, you can have a horrible day. Other times, despite being at the happiest moment in your life, where you're finally in control of your life and feeling good and free, a few things from your old life can come back and haunt you, ruining your day, weekend, or week. I've been stuck in one of the ruts for a few days now. It was celebration weekend this past weekend at my school, and I had a great time seeing my parents and hanging out, but I couldn't get over this depression feeling inside of me. The week before, I went home for a few days for my fathers birthday. During that time, I returned to the hospital, where I had an internship last year. It was great to see my old advisors and co-workers, but I ran into a co-worker who I hadn't seen since his sons-my teammates-funeral this past summer. He acted well, but it was pretty clear that life was pretty tough for him. We caught up, and afterwords I couldn't get rid of the pit in my stomach. A few days later, another friend from home-who's father passed away in a tragic car accident 100 yards from my house-went on a rant about how bad life was and how he was sick of society. Needless to say, it's been a rough week. My usual techniques for getting over this sort of thing haven't been working too well. I'll workout or go running, but after a few hours I'm back in my slump. Then, tonight, I remembered a video a friend of mine made about venting through his guitar. I listened to the song once, and started to feel better. I've been listening to music constantly since, and have been feeling exponentially better.
This is not my first time running into musical therapy, but I haven't needed it to this extent in a long time. I have always been one to support musical therapy, but it wasn't until the end of my sophomore year that I discovered the true power of musical therapy. To make a long story short, a family member suffering from a mental breakdown ended up accidentally burning half of my house down. To say music saved not only my academic standing but possibly my life is an understatement. Despite meeting with a psychologist, increasing my physical activity, and getting extra help in classes, I felt like my life was closing in around me. My family was suddenly at war with each other, pointing fingers, making accusations, and splitting us in two. I had no idea how to deal with this sudden turn of events, especially since-as the only person in my family under 25 at the time-I felt my opinion was often overlooked or ignored. Only music, and its ability to slip you into your own little world, kept my head above the waves of accusation flooding my house. My personal discovery of Vevo, music on youtube, soundcloud, and my re-introduction with Pandora were the difference. Whenever I came home, the headphones went in. Doing homework, studying for a test washing the dishes or reading a book for pleasure, if I did it with music, it was done on time an efficiently, if I couldn't have music, things never got done. With time, like all things, the situation resolved itself, and my family is back together, but I have never forgotten what music did for me, and I have always suggested it to my friends when they are in need.
Simply put, music is free medicine; it can always fit your mood, and you can use it to gradually calm yourself down or pick yourself up. In my english class, we talked about the definition of words, and how definitions can be outdated, limiting, or just downright wrong. Medicine, as defined by western terms, means the act of healing or preserving health with a physical remedy, be it drugs or physical procedure. But music literally saved my life, so shouldn't it too be a medicine? Yeah, it's not something you can hold, inject, or prescribe, but where therapy failed, music picked up the slack and finished the job. Shouldn't something that heals, physical or not, complex or simple, be considered medicine? Consider a terminally ill cancer patient. Her radiation therapy is extremely painful and she seems to be at the end of her rope. Then a 2nd party person, be it a friend, family member, or anonymous supporter, give her tickets to see her favorite band live at their big concert. The excitement of the show blocks the pain, and the show is so good that she is singing along with the crowd and happier then she has been since getting diagnosed. The ecstasy of the show carries for a few more days before the gradually returns to her original state of painful treatment. However, she never gets quite as bad as she was before the show, because purely by experiencing that momentary high, she is better off for the rest of her life. (For happiness sake, lets say that miraculously the new treatment is successful and she lives cancer free into old age). Now, yes, the doctor can't just go in and say "your dying, go to a music concert," but how can one music show make this cancer patient go painfree for a week, and then you turn around and tell me music isn't medicine? It just doesn't make sense. If something makes a bad situation better-or even just not get any worse- it's a medicine. Prescription drug, chicken soup, or an internet connection and a pair of headphones all fit this criteria, and therefore are medicines. If you disagree, hire a children's' comedian to entertain the terminal kids in the pediatric center of the hospital for 1/2 a day. I guarantee it makes a bigger impact then any "real medicine" they are taking.
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I got the missing string for my guitar today. Next post will be a musical update, thanks for waiting guys; I just had to get this off my chest. If anyone has any questions about this post or wants more details about my personal story, message me and I'll be happy to respond.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Quick Update
Today my roommate asked me to play a slow, sad song, and I picked the song "Only Time" by Enya. To me, the song is a reminder of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 because the first time I watched a video of the attacks on youtube (as a young adult-I had seen the attacks before, but as a child who didn't really know what was going on), the video was to this song. I remember balling after it, and discussing it with my friends who were similarly upset by it. To my surprise, my roommate reacted with extreme excitement and pleasure. He told me that his mother used to play this song when he was going to sleep as a very small child, and he was getting lots of memories from his very early childhood he thought he had forgotten.
I was struck as to how this song could bring up such terrible memories of death for one person, but at the same time bring back extremely happy memories of childhood for another person; just another example of the obscene power of music.
I was struck as to how this song could bring up such terrible memories of death for one person, but at the same time bring back extremely happy memories of childhood for another person; just another example of the obscene power of music.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
"They Shut Off the Power" and Other Problems musicians Run Into
So, in true new-musican fashion, I started off thinking that I was going to be bad, but be able to pull something together eventually. Just as Turkle describes the new generation's need to respond to a text immediately, I felt that I needed immediately understand and be able to play chords on the guitar and use Live. 6 hours later, I stared at my broken guitar and computer running some software that is way to complicated for me to figure out alone, and a random 'instrument' I made while my computer freaked out for the uptenth time. It was suddenly 2:30am, and all I had accomplished was ensuring that I would be doing the majority of my work the following day, after an early morning practice. Here's a summery of my first night as a struggling musician.
Maybe the most common and readily available, yet the most complicated and impressive instrument, the guitar entered my life as my tool for the first time in a LONG time. As a young kid (6 years ago), I took guitar lessons for a few weeks, but after learning how to play a few green day songs from their new album, I ended up dropping guitar to continue my saxophone lessons. I had borrowed my brother's electric guitar for those lessons, but I have since fallen in love with the acoustic guitar. The ability to play without any electronics is fascinating, and playing chords and scales instead of random tabs and power chords is a huge step up. Rather then go out and spend hundreds of dollars, I went home and ended up borrowing my mother's old guitar from her childhood. My brother's acoustic was also at home, but it only had five strings so I went with mom's nylon guitar (there are two types of guitar strings, nylon and steel. Steel are more rugged and have a harder should, but hurt your fingers when you are starting out, causing blisters and eventually calluses. Nylon strings do not hurt your fingers, but sound and feel softer and quieter.) Anyway, I returned to school with a guitar and a chord book. I thought it would be a good idea to quickly run through all the chords before I went in and learned each one in depth. Three chords in (it was a C chord), for whatever reason, I managed to break a string. Now I thought about going on without the string, but even though I'm new to music, I know a bad sound when I hear one. I decided to put guitar on hold until I made it into town to get new strings.
Next I opened Ableton Live in an attempt to maybe make a very basic mashup or an extremely simple house song. I know the basics of ableton, but once it came to editing, beat matching, play delay, semi-continuous loops, and cueing, I suddenly realized I was WAY over my head. I spent the next 5 1/2 hours searching for a way to make a vocal track come in 7.3.2 measures late, or how to match up a new beat with a random lady gaga vocal track that has a similar bpm (beats per minute). Long story short, I ended up with many loops repeating, no real song, and a realization that this was going to be extremely difficult. Fortunately, a few of my friends are DJs who use Live regularly, so I'm going to get a few pointers from them before I attempt another mashup.
At some point during the night-I'm not really sure when-I decided to clean up my desk and throw away some of the junk on my desk. This included the old keyboard from my laptop that was replaced because Apple used faulty plastic. As I was going to throw it in the trash, my hand happened to flick a springy piece of metal on the underside of the keyboard. It vibrated, creating a sound and sparking my imagination. I took the keyboard back, and re-bent all of the pieces of springy metal so they were easier to flick. I then proceeded to "play" this new instrument until my roommate told me it sounded like crap and wasn't really that cool. While I understand it sounding rather bad, I personally think that it is really cool to take random objects, and use them in a way they were not intended to be used, thereby creating music. I'm going to try to keep this up, and see what the most creative instrument I can come up with is.
Maybe the most common and readily available, yet the most complicated and impressive instrument, the guitar entered my life as my tool for the first time in a LONG time. As a young kid (6 years ago), I took guitar lessons for a few weeks, but after learning how to play a few green day songs from their new album, I ended up dropping guitar to continue my saxophone lessons. I had borrowed my brother's electric guitar for those lessons, but I have since fallen in love with the acoustic guitar. The ability to play without any electronics is fascinating, and playing chords and scales instead of random tabs and power chords is a huge step up. Rather then go out and spend hundreds of dollars, I went home and ended up borrowing my mother's old guitar from her childhood. My brother's acoustic was also at home, but it only had five strings so I went with mom's nylon guitar (there are two types of guitar strings, nylon and steel. Steel are more rugged and have a harder should, but hurt your fingers when you are starting out, causing blisters and eventually calluses. Nylon strings do not hurt your fingers, but sound and feel softer and quieter.) Anyway, I returned to school with a guitar and a chord book. I thought it would be a good idea to quickly run through all the chords before I went in and learned each one in depth. Three chords in (it was a C chord), for whatever reason, I managed to break a string. Now I thought about going on without the string, but even though I'm new to music, I know a bad sound when I hear one. I decided to put guitar on hold until I made it into town to get new strings.
Next I opened Ableton Live in an attempt to maybe make a very basic mashup or an extremely simple house song. I know the basics of ableton, but once it came to editing, beat matching, play delay, semi-continuous loops, and cueing, I suddenly realized I was WAY over my head. I spent the next 5 1/2 hours searching for a way to make a vocal track come in 7.3.2 measures late, or how to match up a new beat with a random lady gaga vocal track that has a similar bpm (beats per minute). Long story short, I ended up with many loops repeating, no real song, and a realization that this was going to be extremely difficult. Fortunately, a few of my friends are DJs who use Live regularly, so I'm going to get a few pointers from them before I attempt another mashup.
At some point during the night-I'm not really sure when-I decided to clean up my desk and throw away some of the junk on my desk. This included the old keyboard from my laptop that was replaced because Apple used faulty plastic. As I was going to throw it in the trash, my hand happened to flick a springy piece of metal on the underside of the keyboard. It vibrated, creating a sound and sparking my imagination. I took the keyboard back, and re-bent all of the pieces of springy metal so they were easier to flick. I then proceeded to "play" this new instrument until my roommate told me it sounded like crap and wasn't really that cool. While I understand it sounding rather bad, I personally think that it is really cool to take random objects, and use them in a way they were not intended to be used, thereby creating music. I'm going to try to keep this up, and see what the most creative instrument I can come up with is.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Dual Personalities?
First off, as a side note, I'd like to mention that I finally recieved my copy of Ableton Live, so I will start playing around with music production and recording soon, and I'm going home this weekend and I hope to return on sunday with a guitar.
Who are musicians? I don't mean the band or the performer, but who are they really? I've had the privilege of knowing many musicians, some world wide famous others just locals who love to play, but they all have two personalities; the person they are on stage and they person they are in normal life. I've always been interested in how the two are similar and different, and how they live together.
As far as I can tell, the men and women of music off stage are pretty normal. They usually have some strange habits-like locking themselves in their practice rooms for hours on end, or listening to pieces of music they hope to play on repeat endlessly so that if/when they do play it, they already know it-and can occasionally be a bit awkward in social situations. Sometimes the awkwardness is due to the fact that everyone wants to be their friend, but sometimes it is just due to them being a bit awkward. There are two examples in my life that I feel demonstrate this very well.
First, there is my friend from back home, Simon*. Simon has been the all-state jazz first trombonist since he was in 5th grade. He had devoted his entire life to music. When he's not playing, his headphones are in his ears, or he has his head deep in a music theory book. The only time he isn't actively engaging in music is when he is sleeping. He prefers to stay in the background and focus on his music, rather then grab the spotlight. When he is on stage, however, he is a different person entirely. When he stands up for his solo, you know a few things: 1. this concert is about to get a lot better. 2. the energy in the place was just cranked a few notches...or a lot of notches, and 3. Simon is literally about to blow your mind. The things he can achieve on (literally) a piece of bent plumbing are incredible. He's a class-A performer, who engages, reads, and entertains the crowd, and he lives up to the extremely high standard he sets for himself. Simon lives for his music, and his ability is a gift both to him and to all those who experience his performance, yet unless he is performing, he stays in the background and lets things happen as they will.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have James Taylor. I've grown up listening to James Taylor my entire life, but I had no idea of how big he was until he decided to send his kids to the same school I attended. At one of the first school functions that year, all of the teachers were extremely excited about something, but-due to both a request by James and by common courtsey-they weren't acting on it. As time went on, and we all adjusted to James being around, it became very clear that this was someone looking for a normal life outside of his profession. James loves his job, but when he's not performing or on tour, he doesn't want to be swamped with followers asking for autographs and pictures; he wants to enjoy time with his kids and his close friends. While I was never extremely close with him, I did have the opportunity to hang out with James while his kids played after school and I waited for my mother to pack up her room for the day (she teaches at the school). I actually got to baby sit the kids for a few hours one day when their parents were at school conferences, something I later learned was apparently much bigger deal then just helping a friend out. Because this was my first interaction with a rock star, I figured it was always this way, but I was wrong. A few years later, my mother and I were invited to participate in a shoot that was part of James' new movie One Man Band. I figured that it wasn't that big of a deal, but when we arrived at the theater, there were people lined up from the parking lot to the stage door waiting to see James, get a picture, or maybe an autograph. Even more shocking to me was that he was completely willing to do so (I'm not saying James isn't nice, just that the James I knew never held himself on a different level then myself, but here he was god to these fans.) It struck me that, even though this was clearly the same man, this was also a completely different person.
I never got the opportunity to ask him about this topic, but when we were discussing in class how people can get so involved in their online selves that they prefer them to their real selves, I couldn't help but wonder if it was the same with musicians, and-more importantly-if James preferred to be James my friend, or James Taylor the rock star.
*Name changed for safety reasons.
Who are musicians? I don't mean the band or the performer, but who are they really? I've had the privilege of knowing many musicians, some world wide famous others just locals who love to play, but they all have two personalities; the person they are on stage and they person they are in normal life. I've always been interested in how the two are similar and different, and how they live together.
As far as I can tell, the men and women of music off stage are pretty normal. They usually have some strange habits-like locking themselves in their practice rooms for hours on end, or listening to pieces of music they hope to play on repeat endlessly so that if/when they do play it, they already know it-and can occasionally be a bit awkward in social situations. Sometimes the awkwardness is due to the fact that everyone wants to be their friend, but sometimes it is just due to them being a bit awkward. There are two examples in my life that I feel demonstrate this very well.
First, there is my friend from back home, Simon*. Simon has been the all-state jazz first trombonist since he was in 5th grade. He had devoted his entire life to music. When he's not playing, his headphones are in his ears, or he has his head deep in a music theory book. The only time he isn't actively engaging in music is when he is sleeping. He prefers to stay in the background and focus on his music, rather then grab the spotlight. When he is on stage, however, he is a different person entirely. When he stands up for his solo, you know a few things: 1. this concert is about to get a lot better. 2. the energy in the place was just cranked a few notches...or a lot of notches, and 3. Simon is literally about to blow your mind. The things he can achieve on (literally) a piece of bent plumbing are incredible. He's a class-A performer, who engages, reads, and entertains the crowd, and he lives up to the extremely high standard he sets for himself. Simon lives for his music, and his ability is a gift both to him and to all those who experience his performance, yet unless he is performing, he stays in the background and lets things happen as they will.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have James Taylor. I've grown up listening to James Taylor my entire life, but I had no idea of how big he was until he decided to send his kids to the same school I attended. At one of the first school functions that year, all of the teachers were extremely excited about something, but-due to both a request by James and by common courtsey-they weren't acting on it. As time went on, and we all adjusted to James being around, it became very clear that this was someone looking for a normal life outside of his profession. James loves his job, but when he's not performing or on tour, he doesn't want to be swamped with followers asking for autographs and pictures; he wants to enjoy time with his kids and his close friends. While I was never extremely close with him, I did have the opportunity to hang out with James while his kids played after school and I waited for my mother to pack up her room for the day (she teaches at the school). I actually got to baby sit the kids for a few hours one day when their parents were at school conferences, something I later learned was apparently much bigger deal then just helping a friend out. Because this was my first interaction with a rock star, I figured it was always this way, but I was wrong. A few years later, my mother and I were invited to participate in a shoot that was part of James' new movie One Man Band. I figured that it wasn't that big of a deal, but when we arrived at the theater, there were people lined up from the parking lot to the stage door waiting to see James, get a picture, or maybe an autograph. Even more shocking to me was that he was completely willing to do so (I'm not saying James isn't nice, just that the James I knew never held himself on a different level then myself, but here he was god to these fans.) It struck me that, even though this was clearly the same man, this was also a completely different person.
I never got the opportunity to ask him about this topic, but when we were discussing in class how people can get so involved in their online selves that they prefer them to their real selves, I couldn't help but wonder if it was the same with musicians, and-more importantly-if James preferred to be James my friend, or James Taylor the rock star.
*Name changed for safety reasons.
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