It's OK to be a Musician

For my entire adult life (I am now in my 50's) I have greatly admired those who can read and perform music. Look at what they have accomplished, I tell myself. And, of course, it's true. The list is so long of accomplished musicians who dedicated themselves to their craft, including learning the theory and practice of western music (by that, I mean the study of keys, minor and major scales, modes, intervals, and so forth) that naming any is an insult to those left off the list. For classical music if I mentioned Bach, but left off Mozart, or for jazz mentioned Brubeck but left off Metheny, I could not offer a justification.

But I digress.

What has gnawed at me over all this time has been the paradox of the accomplished artist who never studied music. Who only knew about keys, because the shorthand for communicating with fellow musicians demanded it. Who wrote songs that have profoundly moved me and a generation of others. Of course foremost among then are the Beatles. Though I do not believe that learning formal music necessarily stifles creativity (think of the sublime transcendence of Miles Davis in the classic Kind of Blue tracks) I do believe that there are melodies and chord progressions that are likely to never have been invented if the musicians who invented them had spent many years schooled in formal musical education. Examples include many of the songs of Joni Mitchell and, for me the inspiration for this blog, the song 4 + 20 by Stephen Stills (that song has the unlikely but chilling guitar tuning of DDDDAD.

So, for myself (I play guitar and sing in the band The Karma'addicts) I will from now on celebrate my lack of formal musical education! I will thrill, unapologetic, to the melodies I invent that have no studied genesis but instead spring raw and untamed from the muse that--now and then--passes through.

Our creative lives are more public now than maybe ever before (blogs, email, YouTube...).

But then again, maybe not. Before the written word, which is to say for probably 90% or more of human history, all we had for communication was spoken word. So we had to get good at listening, and at memorizing, and at improvising. Also, the bards of our tribes did not have the luxury--narcissism?---of going off by themselves to work and rework their schtick.

So, maybe we need to just lighten up and relax with the public nature of our discourse. It's not so different from what our ancestors experienced.