Don’t be Pavlov’s cat.
If nothing else, be memorable.
If nothing else, be memorable.
 As musicians, we often call it “finding our voice”.
Other people describe it as finding their calling. Some say hitting their groove. The phrase “self-actualization” has been appropriated as well. I was fortunate. I found my first voice when I was in elementary school. I mean, I didn’t just find it. I nailed it. I wasn’t looking for it. It found me. As a musician, finding your voice is critical. It transcends technique. It doesn’t require vocabulary, a degree, or a teacher. It relies on intuition and can be lost as easily as it can be found. The day you find it is like another birthday. As a musician standing in front of a room full of kids, if you haven't found your voice, it's really impossible for you to provide any guidance to help them find their voice. As Harvey McKay once said, “Beware the naked man who offers you the shirt off his back.” Oh, you’ll be able to teach a lot of music product. Interesting facts, complex theories, speed and dexterity. But if you don’t find your voice, it’s all just so much aural posturing and posing. Oscar Wilde said that people could be divided into two groups: charming and tedious. I believe that it’s actually three groups: people who find their voice, people who find multiple voices, and people – for whatever reason – who do not find their voice. I fall into the second category. (For the record, I have heard many talented, photogenic, and efficacious musicians who have yet to find their voice. They can perform extremely complex and athletic music. Finding your voice is not a prerequisite for success. That said, I have heard many third graders who have found their voice.) The first voice I found was my singing voice. As a little kid, I was singing all the time, usually by myself or with the radio, and especially in church. I didn’t even realize that I had found my singing voice nor did anyone tell me that they heard it. I assumed that everyone was the same. You breath, you talk, you sing. I thought everyone could do it. I had great range, could match vibrato with any recoded singer, and could memorize long Paul Desmond alto sax solos and scat them perfectly. The first voice I tried to find was my piano voice. I was basically trying to replicate the melodies that I was singing, only now using my fingers on the keyboard. I wasn't too worried about harmony, just melody. It was all linier. Like I said, I tried. I was on the right path but far from where I wanted to be on piano. And spare me the “it’s a journey, not a destination” platitudes. I didn’t give a damn about the journey, the cost, the shoe leather – at the age of ten, I would have bequeathed anything to understand the mysteries of the piano. I wanted to get there. I wanted to arrive. By fourth grade I moved on to trying to find my voice on the trumpet. The first few months on trumpet were exceptionally ugly given that I couldn't figure out the overtime system and that my buck teeth kept cutting into my lips and creating a cerise tide pouring out of my spit valves. I could hear my parents futile attempts at stifling their laughter downstairs when I practiced in my room. But as I matured through junior high, I did find my voice on trumpet. I was figuring out solos by Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Snooky Young, Thad Jones, and Herb Alpert trumpet parts. Eight measures here, eight measures there. It adds up. I was able to copy on trumpet what I sang and visa versa. When I wasn’t playing trumpet but was thinking about my trumpet tone, I heard it in darker shades rather than brighter ones, which didn't help with a lot of classical approaches in college. High school was a turnaround time for me. It was a time of huge discovery in finding my voice. The instrument where it all clicked was double bass. Now, I was abysmal as far as a classical technique. But I put in the hours with bowing and started to hear the sound that morphed the sound in my head with a sound I had never experience before. I was beyond the sound I heard in my head. Pizzicato. I didn’t know it at the time but what I had discovered was “the pocket”, that magical place where notes exist in time. When I started playing jazz and pop stuff on upright, it was like a musical denouement . All the parts of the puzzle came together – including piece I had never known existed before - and I was putting the right notes in the exact right places for me. While I had experience similar sensations singing, this had a more mature inevitability about it, as if I was meant to play these notes at these exact times and places. There was a momentum to my playing, a visualizing of the notes and lines when I wasn’t playing as much as when I was. It was something I had never previously experienced. That newly found confidence expanded like compounded interest. It affected my trumpet and piano playing. It influenced everything else I was trying for the first time in music at that point of my life. Especially orchestrating and composing. My vision was becoming vertical as well as linier. I had started to study scores. String quartets, symphonies, jazz charts, Broadway orchestrations - by dissecting the printed pages of other composers and getting an idea of how they found their voices, I was able to start to find my own on manuscript paper. With each pathological autopsy, I was getting a better understanding of how the sum of the parts created the whole. I didn’t play electric bass or guitar until I graduated from college. I had my double bass background to keep me grounded on the electric. So many electric bassists are frustrated guitar players and have a tendency to treat the bass part as one big opportunity to solo or constantly embellish (the brits call it wanking off). I was grounded in jazz and knew how to stay in my lane and sonically on my shelf. The last voice I found was on guitar. It took me fifteen years and thousands of hours of playing and practice time. Don’t get me wrong. I was playing guitar all the time at school and on gigs. I had a sound in my head, though, that I wasn’t finding. It took a lot of time and I sometimes thought it would never be like it was when I was playing double bass. But I found that guitar voice and, in another post, I’ll tell the story of why that voice was so elusive for so long. By now, you realize that my approach is that of a polymath in a specialist’s clothing. I put in Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours at an early age but oddly realized that when I found my voice, it told me to continue looking for others. Without going all Siggy Freud on you, that could have been the subtle product of being an only child looking for someone to sing with. In my small child’s world, one voice became a duet became a trio until I came to the realization that I didn’t have a single voice or several multiple voices: I had a chorus of voices, each with its own particular role and strength to support and amplify the sound I heard in my head before I ever made a sound outside of my body. To this day, all the music I play, sing, or write is just an amplification of that sound in my head - that first voice. In the end, your voice finds you. More on finding your vice in future posts.  Any choice, decision, or action plan is better than no choice, no decision, or no action plan.
Atrophy is more deadly than any calculated misstep. Take action.  I never took piano lessons as a kid, no guitar lessons either. I did take trumpet lessons forever as well as double bass lessons for a few years. The sum total of my piano lessons was a semester course in college where we did class piano in a keyboard studio. There were about 25 Wurlitzer electric pianos that were tied into the mothership that the teacher sat behind. We were outfitted with state-of-the-art technology, looking like air traffic controllers with headsets and microphones. All the keyboards were connected to the mothership with ¼ cables. MIDI wouldn’t be invented for another twelve years. My teacher was the kindest sweetest woman in the department, Miss Nannis. The music wasn't that hard because it was a course design for non-piano players. I quickly resolved to make my goal to be able to look at the music, analyze it, keep my eyes on the page and not my fingers, and play it in such a way that was easier but still sound reasonably, like what was on the printed page. With a lot of practice, I became adept at matching the harmonic and melodic content while keeping the texture and density approximately the same. Miss Nannis didn't realize I was doing this until the last day of class but she still gave me an A in the course, primarily because of my resourcefulness. In college, when I had trio or folk gigs accompanying others, I rarely used music. I kept my eye on the audience and smiled. If it was a reading gig, I was usually buried in the rhythm section – but I still knew I should create eye contact with the audience. When I eventually had to front a band and was responsible for many tunes, I used lyric sheets but followed the “80/20 Rule”: 80% of the time looking at the audience, 20% of the time peeking at the lyrics, and never looking at my fingers. Flash forward a few decades. I was playing piano and guitar every day while accompanying choruses or teaching in general music class. Everything I played I either had memorized or could figure out on the fly. At the beginning of every general music class, we all sang “The Hello Song”. I either played it on guitar or piano, and some days I would ask the kids before I started, “What's your choice? What do you want me to play, piano or guitar?” It always began in a very subdued mood and built to a raucous ending, complete with jazz hands and fist-pump “Yeah”. One day late in my career as we were getting ready to start our opener, a member of admin came into my classroom to do an unannounced observation. Most teachers get a little nervous with a surprise visit that is going to impact their performance rating for the year but I had been doing this for so many decades that it was just a little wrinkle that would made the next 45 minutes more interesting. As I started “The Hello Song” on piano, the administrator was rapidly typing on their laptop. They weren't looking at the class, they weren't looking at me, they were looking at their fingers as they typed. This administrator might as well have been in another room listening to an audio feed of our class. This person was missing every nuance that I was adding to the song. They were missing the fact that I was playing piano and maintaining 100% eye contact with my students. This administrator was looking at their fingers! At the end of the raucous ending of our opener, I gave the class some “go time” and walked over to the administrator. I whispered from behind their chair, “You know, the expectation when I play piano is that I don't look at my fingers, that I know where the notes are that I have to play without looking. That's the only way I can look at the class while I play, by not looking at my fingers.” The administrator kept their eyes glued to their laptop, typing away. I continued. “Given that you looked at your fingers through the entire “Hello Song”, would you like to have a pad of paper and pencil so that might be easier to glance up every once and a while? Or maybe you would like us to do the tune again so you can observe the kid’s flawless vocal technique? Or would you rather simply do this observation on another day? A day when you don’t have to look at your fingers?” Every time I started teaching in a new elementary school and played piano for the first time for the kids, they would instinctively think that it was an opportunity to talk, make faces, not sing, etc. because after all, the piano player has to look at their fingers and not the class, right? At which point, I would stop playing and perform this small prepared script: “Oh, you think I'm like those other music teachers who have to look at their fingers when they play piano, right? Well, I'm not like them. I can play piano and look at you at the same time.” I would then start to play something like Mozart’s “Minuet in G” and continue staring at them while I spoke. “I can tell when you're not doing the right thing even though my fingers are playing the piano. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. I can do the same when I play guitar. I can go “Lionel Richie” with this no-look stuff. I can go “All Night Long”!” Eye contact is one of the most crucial elements to master when teaching elementary music. And while you’re at it, don’t blink. It conveys a sense of weakness while a consisted gaze creates intensity. If you are in front of a class, don't look at your fingers. If you’re in front of an audience and using music, apply the 80/20 rule. Music teachers, pianists, and guitarists should be looking at their students looking at them looking at their students. Or you could just do it another day.  |
AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
February 2025
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