Tone deaf

Musical meritocracy vs. watercolor wisdom

“So what do you listen to?”

I turned to my new friend with this question because our husbands were on the verge of taking over the evening‘s conversation, and I felt the threat posed to our new quartet’s shared camaraderie by the coming nerdgasm. No shade to our gents; her man is taking guitar lessons from mine, and they are deep into exegesis of finger versus pick. I get it. As a fellow geek, I know how we forget ourselves. I’ve been one of the musical gabbers oblivious to others’ eyes slowly glazing over. But these new friends are warm and fun and I’m deeply invested in things going well.

So I turn to her and ask. And she gives a familiar answer, with a familiar wave of the hand.

“I’m not really musical.”

“She loves George Strait,” says her husband admiringly.

“I just know what I like.”

I chime in. “That’s what I’m interested in, what you like.”

She smiles almost apologetically. “Just admitting that I don’t have an ear for music. I’ve been tone deaf since I was a girl.”

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Three hours earlier, when we’d arrived at their house and teacher and student had started unpacking their guitars, she had held out an empty toilet paper roll to me and said, laughing, “Are you up for a project?“

We walked out back to her studio, and she opened the door to reveal, amongst shelves crammed with supplies and walls crammed with canvases, a table laid with paper, watercolors and brushes.

Oh boy, I thought, I don’t know how to do any of this.

“It’s totally okay if this isn’t your thing,” she said. “I can just show you the studio.”

Hell no. A hundred caveats knocked at my throat’s door, some demure and others comedic, all excuses to apologize in advance for not being Picasso. Somehow I held them all back (I‘ve been working on this, please be proud of me) and just sat down in the damn chair. And for the next forty-five minutes or so, we talked in the manner of getting-to-know-you new friends. We chatted about family, work, holiday plans, her recent showing in Georgia, my upcoming trip to Phoenix. She disappeared once to check on the baking cornbread.

And in the spaces in between, I made this, approximately 50 years after the last time I held a watercolor brush:

In small moments in our conversation she’d say things like “Let me just do this first and then you do it.” She’d say, “you know, if you decide there’s too much paint in some place, you can always get water on your brush and kind of erase.” She’d say, “Look at that cool thing happening there with those two colors you put together!” She’d say, “you know, often when I do this it’s messy, and I kind of like it.”

And looking at this uploaded photo, I have to say that I kind of like it too, that it’s pretty. It‘s not remarkable, but making it was an absolute pleasure. When I tried to tell my friend at the end of the evening how much fun the whole experience had been, all she said was, “I wasn’t sure you’d be into it - I’m glad you were!”

Not once in that evening did the question of talent come up, of whether or not I had an “eye.”

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Since then I’ve been thinking. Why did my confident friend with the delightful, easy laugh, an artist and teacher who guided me so expertly through a process I had no aptitude for, step away from the question of her favorite music?

Why did that encounter remind me of so many other conversations, spanning years, in which other creative and sunny people had backed away from discussing music?

Why do so many people readily describe themselves as being tone deaf, as having “no ear?”

I want to say that there’s more space for non-experts to talk about - and participate in - visual art, but I also know I might be wrong about this. After all, there are snobs in the art world (you don’t say). I know artistic experts suffer the opinions of arrogant cousins or classmates who assert that kindergartners can paint like Pollock. Maybe discomfort around musical opinion hits me because music is my thing. But I suspect it’s more than that.

Painters work alone, but musicians work in groups. When do we start letting people know that they’re not good enough to be in the band?

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When my family moved to Arizona my junior year of high school, we gravitated toward the fancy Lutheran church with the good music program. The music director was a skilled, soignée woman who recruited me to help her assistant director with the Cherub Choir, fourth grade and younger. Getting ready for the humongous Christmas Eve service one Wednesday post-hot dish potluck, she walked into our rehearsal and asked for a run-through of what would be our featured song. I can still remember the littlest dude in the front, not quite five, singing with his clear, tiny pipe of a voice:

Away in a mainjoo, no cwib fowa bed

The director watched and listened, and when the kids finished she stepped forward and smiled.

“Good job, good job.” She paused, stepped closer, and gently stretched out a hand to touch a few children on the head.

“You. You. You. And you.” Four kids, looking up at her, wondering at this unfamiliar benediction.

She took one step back, met all four kids’ eyes, and smiled again, not unkindly.

“When we get to the last verse? Where we sing in harmony?” She paused, nodded as they nodded in response.

“You four don’t sing there.”

Littlest Dude was one of the four. For the life of me, I have no memory of his reaction or that of the other kids. Did they know enough to be hurt or embarrassed, or was it just another instruction from a grownup? Chances are good that Littlest Dude has no memory of that moment, but the other three children were old enough to have carried it with them. I wonder if they describe themselves now to their friends as tone deaf.

I remember I felt angry. How unfair I found the director’s action, and how it seemed like such a bad trade-off, that sweet cwib sacrificed for a slightly better blend, young kids’ participatory joy dimmed in the search for slightly more pristine tuning.

But at the time, I was preparing for my first competitions, and enjoying the regular attention of my own high school choir director who was happy to have me as the new accompanist. I felt the discomfiture of other students when he praised me, but I loved being singled out. As much as my heart hurt for the Cherub Choir members at church, had my high school director asked his weakest choir members to sit out the toughest musical passages, I would have found it a great idea.

It didn’t seem right to cut a kindergartner, but at sixteen, I was getting used to the idea that my progress was connected to the exclusion of others. That, in order for some of us to rise, others had to fall.

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sorry to have pursued high-level musical training and achievement. But for many years, I thought that success in those arenas was a simple matter of good stress management, desire, and dedication. At first, I didn’t see all the barriers erected by social and economic inequality. And I didn’t think about the way most of our teachers separated us by ability so early, and what the long term impacts of that could be.

Had college not been so inexpensive in the eighties, I would have figured out the economic part sooner (there is still an essay coming about that dress). And had I not grown up in Northfield MN, I might have figured out the separation part earlier. My hometown held ten thousand souls in the late seventies, and boasted two private four-year colleges. For its population, it had a crazy high percentage of adults who were highly educated, trained in music and other arts - and, having had all the advantages that led to those results, they passed those things on to their kids. We weren’t all gifted musicians, but mostly we all had access to music lessons and really great instruction in school, in church, and privately, thanks to the many highly educated trailing faculty spouses (okay, faculty wives. It was the seventies). Considering the size of the town, we had phenomenally robust participation in school music programs. By high school, there were exclusive groups - madrigals and jazz band, baby - but cutting littles out of a children’s chorus? Northfield Lutherans would never, I thought, not realizing that I accepted our highly musical culture as a result of our mutual love for music rather than a result of our robust and exceptional resources.

Moving to a large city was a quick education in diversity for a kid from my complacent, homogenous background. My new school had students from all kinds of social and economic situations. In ten minutes I could walk with one friend from school to her brand new Frank Lloyd Wright wannabe house with the pool and sauna, or with another to the two-bedroom apartment across from the trailer park where he lived with a mom and three brothers. It wasn’t hard to see not everyone could get the training that made you ready for choir, band or orchestra; it took me longer to see that this didn’t mean there weren’t gifted musicians around every corner. There was a lot of music happening in the student body that didn’t have space in our flagship performance programs. To access those teachers and those stages, you had to know how to read and how to make certain sounds in ensemble; in high school, I learned for the first time that not every young musician wanted to.

But I accepted that the music we were making in band, choir, and orchestra was at the top of the musical food chain - and that there was a chain, and that it had a top - because why else would it be garnering the lion’s share of the attention and resources? (Reader, I was not the sharpest tool in the shed). And there was that new element to life in my big new city high school: competition. At the same time I was getting ready to compete as a pianist, I was setting out to compete in choir and orchestra, to get evaluated at state solo and ensemble, and to audition for placement in All State Choir.

And I loved it. At the time, I didn’t know how exhausted and probably hung over my adjudicators were: all I knew was that I could staunchly sing None But The Lonely Heart at them (yes, Tchaikovsky in English in my junior year, I’m sure it was revelatory) and receive a 1 rating, which I considered proof of my musical superiority over any 2s in the room. It was a new grading system I set out to crush because I could, and it made me feel great even as I could see that it made other people feel like shit. By senior year, really, almost no one went to solo and ensemble unless they had a chance at a 1, and that seemed reasonable to me, sweet summer capitalist that I was.

But nothing matched All State Choir as a nascent neoliberal meritocracy fest. We were seated by ranking in All State: your rank was a score based on a solo plus sight-reading. I’ll have you know that I was the first chair alto in the Arizona All State Choir my senior year, a rank that is literally meaningless in a musical sense because I was, well, one of about thirty people in a section who only sang as a group. The only people who knew about those scores were the singers themselves, so the only result it had was to set us apart from one another.

Again, to be clear, I loved it, because I had what it took to do well in that system: decent natural ability and a love for musicking, yes, but also great training, excellent reading ability and memory, and a self-esteem forming around my status as a musical standout. All of this motivated me to keep going for myself, and to accept the idea that not everyone could do as well as I could. When I went to college and found myself in more intense competitive waters, I was focused ever upward. I didn’t think about all the people who were dropping out behind me, or what our separation might mean down the road.

Fun fact: one of my first conversations in university was with two singers from Texas. It took me about five minutes to brag about my first-chair All State rank, to which the Texans responded, “well, first chair in Arizona…” before bursting into laughter.

IYKYK.

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Fast forward to now, and competition has steadily increased. There’s no denying that the achievements of young musicians who are poised to do well in those systems are impressive. I accompany a high school competition at my university every year, and those singers would leave high school me and my friends in the dust. It’s important for a talented musician to get together with others of similar ability; there’s no denying this step of development.

At the same time, the unequal distribution of musical resources has only gotten more pronounced, and musical opportunities are often tied to non-musical programs for survival. At the small rural high school where my husband substitute teaches, there’s a very respectable marching band because the very respectable football team needs one, and the existence of the marching band makes the jazz band possible. But there’s no choir.

Schools have to do a lot of their own fundraising to support musical instruction, and bigger schools in richer communities have an advantage here as well, with larger populations bases and more well-resourced families. So better, more robust programs will tend to keep growing as it becomes simultaneously harder for less robust programs to avoid shrinking.

Finally, in a culture that not only loves competition but bases many funding decisions around it, the most robust programs gear their pedagogy ever more towards competition. Ask any high school music teacher in Texas how much time they spend on music that is not being readied for contest.

(Side note: the above also impacts attempts at diversifying student repertoire. It takes time for teachers to learn about, and then learn, new rep to assign to students. In a curriculum focused on contest, we are seeing in every state that teachers are reluctant to cede any time to the process of diversifying).

Bottom line - in musical training, as in all aspects of American life, the gap between the haves and the have nots has only widened. Is it any wonder that musical groups of all kinds are having trouble finding and keeping audiences?

Where’s the audience supposed to come from, if music lovers (or even the musically curious) are weeded out of participation earlier and earlier, or are never given the opportunity to try?

Where are the supporters of new groups supposed to come from if there is no practice of supporting anything that isn’t already top-of-the-line?

How do we ask people to come celebrate “excellence” with us when we’ve let them know as early as possible that they are not excellent enough to take part?

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I’ve said it before - excellence is real, even genius. I love the way that the movie Oppenheimer starts, with all that bonkers fiery, swirly imagery. This guy’s head is not like yours, the visuals say, which seems a fair statement about ol’ J. Robert. Just as not every scientist can figure out nuclear physics, not every musician can hear the most complex harmonies or play the most virtuosic creations.

But does it serve their genius to make a continuum from winners down to losers, and for all of us to know where we’re meant to sit in between? To lift some players up, must we necessarily put others down, or leave them out? Even if the most gifted and passionate developing musicians need the chance to come together as part of their development, has it been beneficial to our ecosystem to prioritize this over everyone else’s musical experience?

I love art museums, and it’s not uncommon to have a friend turn down an invitation to go to one with me. People will say that they don’t love visual art, or that they don’t get it. But there’s not the same quality of reticence that folks avoiding music demonstrate. Maybe that’s because a gifted young painter can work on their own - no fellow painter with a lesser gift needs to be discouraged in order for the talented painter to shine. No teacher will come by and touch their head, saying, “when you get to this part of the still life, just don’t paint there.”

In his terrific book The Ideology of Competition in School Music, Sean Robert Powell has a chapter titled “It’s Easier to Imagine the End of Music Education than the End of Competition.” It’s so worth a read, and I hope you dig into it. It’s got me confronting all kinds of things I’ve always believed about competition. There’s no getting around competing in America, it’s how we do - but I mean all the things I believed about competition as a musician, that it was a necessary part of becoming tough and resilient and dedicated and professional. This ideology, that meritocracy was real in music and therefore that the pursuit of excellence through competition was what was making me a better musician, really drove me. It also kept me from looking at the crazy advantages I had. It’s so obvious that having a family and community already steeped in musical practice, not to mention multiple highly trained and passionate teachers around in my small town who because of their circumstances were available to me in a way they wouldn’t have been in a bigger city - all of those relationships were what built the foundation that made my musical development possible. Competition was adjunct to this and may not have even been important in forming my musicianship. But it was certainly important in forming my ideology.

Our dominant culture tells a big story that leaves out so much in order to focus on individual strength, effort, and achievement. Our big musical training systems are caught up in the same fable. It’s scary to think of leaving competition behind, though. Americans love contests, and music making has fit well into competitive molds. What if competition rather than music education is really what Americans like to support?

What if it is only competition that Americans will support?

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A couple days after we had dinner with our friends, I went to an art store and bought my own stuff. I’m painting a little bit every couple of days, starting with some more holiday cards. Am I good at it? I first want to write no, but I think the better answer is who cares, or what does it matter? I like it. It’s fun to make a thing. It can delight me and maybe even someone else without any kind of outside evaluation. It’s valuable to me, this space of play and messing around, completely absent any desire to improve, or to get feedback of any kind.

How do we build spaces for people of any and all ages to approach music like that?

What if we taught music as a part of daily life? Would we then teach people to value it as such? Could that be music education?

If it was, would we support it?

I hold the paintbrush in my hand, listening.

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Thanks for this one to amazing Texas music educators, especially Sean Robert Powell (seriously read his book), Natalie Bradley, and all the grownups at the Talitha Koum Institute in Waco.