 I tell my students that I’m not a teacher.
Not like the teacher in their classroom. Yeah, I know my degree says I’m a teacher. But I’ve always presented myself as a musician, no more, no less. Sometime during my last year of college, I ran across an idea/occupation/term that resonated with me. Bricoleur . . . a tinkerer. I tinker. I don’t tell kids I’m a bricoleur. Them knowing the word isn’t nearly as important as them observing the behaviors. I’ve always been a tinkerer. From the time I was a kid. Taking apart appliances and small machines, trying to understand how they worked. Playing with words and sounds in order to express myself. Puppets, stapled volumes of books, epic stories, juxtaposing Escherian conflicts with elegant dénouements. Putting aluminum foil on classical guitar strings to make them sound . . . different. Never really mastering any idea because mastering wasn’t the goal . . the goal was to have the last idea dovetail to another idea. Arranging or orchestrating sounds on paper. Experimenting with the goal of finding something new to experiment. After I graduated and finding myself in a room full of little children, my first instinct was to act like a bricoleur, never settling on an idea, always finding ways to fold into other ideas like an endless kaleidoscopic origami design. My second instinct was to be a busker, a street musician in search of a street, a maker of music, not to be what a musician in a display at the Smithsonian would look like under glass but rather . . . a bricoleur in hiding, masquerading as a troubadour. Can one be a professional bricoleur? I think I am living proof. I encourage all music educators to explore being a bricoleur as your side hustle. Allow kids and the world to see you experiment, try new things, succeed, fail, morph, crash, burn, rise from the ashes, wash, rinse, repeat. It isn’t the safest lesson plan or life trajectory. It eradicates the comfort zone we all crave, especially as we age. But for people like me – and maybe you – it becomes the air we breath and anything less doesn’t cut it.  The simplest ways to help make your dreams come true?
Don't go to sleep, either literally or figuratively. Or at least cut back if you can. Do your dreaming while you’re wide awake. Now, if you are a kid or have health issues, make sure you get all the sleep you require. I’m just talking to those of us with the capacity to miss a meal or a few hours of sleep on occasion while reaching for the brass ring. Typically, I see myself as a lazy person. But when I look at the data, I have to admit that I accomplished a fair amount over the years. It’s not so much that I was a workaholic as much as I didn’t want to waste time. And I usually had a payment to make – and many of my goals involved the dream of me staying financially solvent. I never was much of a dreamer after I realized that dreams only come true if you have a good plan and are willing to work on it on a regular basis. Minutes turned into hours, hours into days and months. I always seemed to find the will to get things done. The most productive years of my life were spent doing all-nighters pursing multiple goals: writing musicals, studying, practicing, coding my own software, orchestration projects, composing, grad school, recording soundtracks or commercials, gigging - wringing out the most I could out of the 16.5 hours where I wasn't doing my 7.5 hour-a-day job. And I know folks who were more productive than me. For me, each goal had a plan and a system that I could visualize and keep data on. It wasn’t all work. Trust me. There was time for family and reading the Sunday Times. I composed a song that I teach my kids entitled “I Believe in Dreams” that lyrically deals with the dichotomy between the romanticized idea of “believing in dreams” and pragmatically setting and achieving personal goals. Silly as it seems, I believe in dreams. Everyday’s a day when dreams were Meant to come true. But wishin’ on a star Won’t take you very far. Everybody needs a plan to follow. Make your mind up you’ll succeed, Make a list of just what you’ll need, On your mark, get set, Let’s go! Make a movie in your mind Of you nearing the finish line. We become what we believe, Nothing that we can’t achieve, With some hard work, you will see Victory! If at first you fail, Don’t you tuck your tail: Hold your head up high! If you dare to follow through, All your dreams might just come true. If you believe in dreams, They’ll believe in you, If you believe in dreams, They’ll believe in you! The lyric twist at the end that dreams can actually believe in you is my conceptualization of momentum. When you are persistently working on a goal and start to feel momentum, that’s your dream believing in you. I know. Hoaky. But believe it or not, it works more times than it doesn’t.  I was listening to different versions of the Beethoven symphonies when I ran across the recordings by Sir Roger Norrington. If you want to hear something you’ve never heard before, check them out.
In a phrase: they are off to the races. Imagine listening to Bernstein’s recording on YouTube at a 1.50 playback speed. Norrington says he used Beethoven’s original metronome markings. As I listened, it reminded me of the first time I heard Glenn Gould’s Bach – like, where has this been all my life? I can’t un-hear it and I don’t know if I’ll ever experience the fifth the same way again – Solti, Ormandy, and von Karajan will sound like ultra-romantic and slow motion the next time I hear them. |
AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
May 2025
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