Practice Makes Imperfect

This morning I was listening to an old J.S. Bach CD, literally one of the first CD's I owned (my parents got me a CD player and a ten-dollar ten-pack of classical CD's for Christmas when I was twelve). I lay in bed, spacing out completely to the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, just letting that incredible multitude of notes wash through my brain, flushing out all the gummy nooks and crannies, which is the best way to listen to this piece, second only to being part of an ensemble that is playing it. And for the first time in the seventeen years I've owned the CD, I noticed a mistake.

The music of every place and era has a particular character to it. Every now and then, a musician will reach beyond the character of his or her (but mostly his--eff the world!) place and time, and then a new musical era will be born. But this was some solid Bach, some of the most unified and contained madness the world has ever seen. (Here, I wish I could tell you about the ending of the book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but the end is the only really good part, so that would be major spoilers. But it has to do with Bach and it really gets at what I am trying and failing to say.) Bach's music is mathematical. It's beautiful, beautiful art, but, in the Brandenburg Concertos especially, everything lines up. There is nothing out of place. And this note I heard, this "mistake", was definitely out of place. It was like a different, much later era, phoning in and saying, "HALLOO there!" for a fraction of a second.

My orchestra class played the piece at some point, maybe in 8th grade. As I remember it, instead of just being made of four parts (violin, viola, cello, bass), the extreme polyphony required multiple violin parts, multiple viola parts, and so on. So in the (small) chamber orchestra that made the recording I listened to this morning, a single musician was responsible for that one incorrect note. It didn't sound bad. It just sounded like... not Bach. So he or she may not have even noticed it. In fact, he or she may have practiced it that way every day and played it that way in every rehearsal. And that reminded me of something...

My sixth grade teacher once told our class a funny story about playing in her church bell choir: In the last rehearsal before a major performance (maybe a Christmas show?) the director of the bell choir noticed that one of the ringers had been ringing B-flat instead of B-natural all along. The ringer promised to remember to play it "right", but suggested they run through the piece one more time so she could practice playing it right. They ran through the piece, and this time, as she had promised, she played the note "right". But everyone hated the way it sounded! For weeks they'd been playing the piece "wrong", so now, playing it "right" sounded wrong. Everyone was in a kerfluffle. How could they play it "right" when "right" sounded so wrong? The director finally decided: they would play the piece "wrong" just so it would sound right to them. And that's what they did. And as far as they could tell, no one in the congregation even noticed.

That old story got me thinking, as many things do, about human behavior in life in general. How many "wrong notes" do we play again and again, just because we're so used to hearing them that way that they've begun to sound right to us?

For example, I have an elderly relative who, like most elderly relatives, would like her family to visit more often. But every time I visit, after serving up hugs and a hot or cold beverage, she sits me down and berates me on every aspect of my person, personality, and beliefs. I wear the wrong clothes! I have the wrong political outlook! I have the wrong political outlook because I went to the wrong school! My health problems are just in my head! But going to a therapist couldn't possibly help with that! I just need to stop being sick! Stop being wrong! Stop being myself in any way! Despite being asked again and again in every way by every member of the family to be nice, she persists, and then is very sad when months go by and maybe this person visited her, but not that person. Or everyone went together to morally support each other, and then everyone left all at once. She could play a different note, be just a little bit nicer, but she goes on banging the same out-of-tune drum, only because after years and years of banging it, it sounds perfectly right to her.

And now, on Election Day, every American is marching around, tooting his or her own melody on his or her own horn. Three hundred million little songs, on three hundred million little horns. When you put certain people together, they make a harmonious sound, but try mixing them in with other people, and they'll blow your eardrums out! What out-of-tune notes are you playing today? Are you creating something new and great, that reaches beyond the constraints of your own era? Or are you playing out of key just to spite someone?

Imagine one person tooting the  note: "Hurricane Sandy was caused by global warming! SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SCIENCE!" Another person, right in his face, toots: "Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by elite ivory tower intellectuals! USA! USA! USA!" These notes are as out of tune with one another as they could be. And, objectively, both notes are "wrong". Somewhere in between is a more likely answer: hurricanes have been happening for as long as our planet has had water and air and heat. But Sandy caused more trouble than previous hurricanes, possibly because the ocean was a bit warmer and higher (for whatever reason) and the warmth over Greenland (however that occurred) pushed Sandy sharply west into New York and New Jersey when previously she had been on a straighter path.

For this issue and everything else in our complicated world, we can learn and study only in order to INFER causes and effects, never to know and understand them fully. But somehow, one note or the other just sounds right to us because we've been playing it for so long in comfortable harmony with like-minded friends. And what is the "right" note anyway? Some people think they've found the sheet music, but they haven't. Every note in this world merely relates to other notes. All our music comes from us. We determine how it sounds.