I had a short email conversation the other day with Ted Gioia, the author of numerous fascinating books on the history of jazz and the origins of songs. You can order his books and read his articles here (and you should).
My lament was that adult amateurs were largely ignored by the professional crowd and thus we are often made to feel, perhaps unintentionally (perhaps not), like dilettantes intruding where we really didn’t belong. He agreed and said, “I’ve often thought we could learn something from traditional societies that don’t recognize the difference between amateur and professional musician. In most pre-industrial cultures, everyone in the community participates in music-making, and idea that only a small group of elites would enjoy this privilege would strike those societies as reprehensible. We need to regain some of that open attitude ourselves. ”
Author, musician, neuro-scientist Dan Levitin (I wonder what he does in his spare time?) has written about the evolutionary origins of music that we all share. In a nutshell, we’re all musicians in the broadest sense of the word. The emergence of “professional musicians” is a relatively recent phenomena (which I’m generally thrilled by).
But my point is not that you can learn to make music, it is that in a fundamental sense you already know how. It’s part of your evolutionary legacy. Unfortunately, making music is not the same as playing the piano. Still, believing that you can – perhaps should – make music will certainly make learning the piano easier.
That belief is often hard won. As Timothy Gallwey has pointed out, we all have an “inner voice” getting in the way of many of the things we’d like to do. This is especially true for people who undertake a big skill like piano playing at a later age. The number of things we decide we can’t do seems to increase the older we get.
So by all means enjoy the music created by talented and creative professionals – and support (with money as well as appreciation) their efforts – but don’t apologize for your own desire to make your own. It’s in your genes.
(If you want to try a Sudnow dot song yourself – check this out.)