Living with Alva all these years has sensitized me to the beauty of silence, from whence all music arises. We can happily travel side by side for hours with scarcely a word spoken. When one of us suggests we listen to some music, we tend to set the bar high, as sweet, silent harmony is hard to beat.
I am delighted with my ability to carry thousands of songs in my pocket. But I am even gayer that I may also carry hundreds of tunes around in my head. For while our devices as well as our home stereos provide us with all kinds of music whenever we please, nothing can supplant the joy of making music, live and together.
As a lifelong educator, I observe trends and changes in the lives of one generation after another. Through the 19th and first half of the 20th century, music was live at home around the piano after supper and live in church, temple or synagogue. We sang together.
As I was growing up through the second half of the 20th century, almost all the children I knew played an instrument and sang freely and often. I remember at age ten discovering that my parents had an LP (that's vinyl, kids) called Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook. I played it over and over, until I could sing along every song with dear, dear Ella.
Since my return to the States in the 1980's, I've observed an ever-increasing trend toward music as an article of consumption and away from something people make, do, create. The schools have lost funding or, in the case of the elite private school where I worked, never seemed important enough to include in every student's education. I consider this trend grievous.
Although I cannot quantify what we've lost, I can feel it and I can hear it. Learning to understand music is incredibly enriching. Learning to create music is completely enlivening. The click of a mouse can never stand in for the joy of bowing on the cello, gliding on the trombone, or opening our throats in melody and in rhythm.
Tempus fugit. We are temporal beings. How better to make ourselves one with time than to make music? How better to get close to unnameable feelings than to let our spirits emerge through music?
Sing to babies and grandmothers. Sing with children and youth. And sure, turn up the stereo and rock out with your family and with your friends. Nothing can take its place. No earbuds necessary.