[some will chase us and some will find us]
Click to viewSo this is a video in which a deaf percussionist explains how to listen to music and then you never listen to anything the same way ever again.
It's long, yeah, I know. But I have just had an outlook changed, and I am kind of still reeling. This is one of the most amazing talks about performance theory and the way in which humans listen to music that I have ever heard.
When I first came to the University of Oklahoma as a bright-eyed young cello major, I went into my first lesson waiting for the wisdom of the ages to crash down upon me, to be assigned my first ~real concerto,~ to emerge with my eyes opened to the wonders of the musical world. Instead, my teacher told me not to touch anything but open strings for the next two weeks, and let me go.
She talks in this video about how her first college teacher took away her drumsticks, made her relearn the instrument completely - how she learned to make it sound with her hands, with her elbows, with her jewelry, how she played on the shell and played it upside down, learned a hundred new ways of listening to the instrument she'd known since she started playing. I remember sitting there in the practice room and just sounding those fifths between strings for half an hour straight - tilting the bow one way or another, dropping it to pluck the strings one or two or three at a time. I learned how close I could get to the neighboring strings without making them sound, how to make them all vibrate with a chord played across only two. I'd kind of forgotten I did that, as I've sunk back into worrying since then - worrying about intonation, about the perfect imitation of another sound, of the problems of tone clarity that still drive me wild.
Sound is sound. The right way to play is as important as the right way to hear. Oh, god, I want to be in a practice room right this second.
It feels so good to feel that way again. :D
ALSO reinadecopas IS HERE AND IT IS SO RAD <3333333