A Heavy Day At The Beach

Heavier Things; John Mayer

I attended Sunday Services at the YMCA near CCM at the University of Cincinnati. The University Lutheran Center (ULC) held worship there every Sunday morning. The hall in which we met had the ambience of a Renaissance Period banquet hall with the tall gothic windows, a huge fireplace and a raised platform on one end where the kind would sit. It overlooked the UC campus and the CCM grounds.

In the March of my first year in graduate school, the ULC sponsored a spring break trip to Florida. A state park at the end of a peninsula close to Panama City, Florida, had three large cabins only a hundred yards or so distance away from the white-sanded beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. The sand was so white and clean that it squeaked when you walked barefoot in it.

I had worked pretty hard on my studies and on some challenging repertoire for three months and I felt that I deserved a little time off. So, I signed myself up for the trip and became one of twelve or so that boarded two vans on Friday evening bound for Florida.

We had quite a mix in our group as far as majors and interests were concerned: a few engineers, a math major, a nurse, a sports medicine major, etc.

One day, out on the beach, one fellow from our group, B., an architecture major, began building tiny sculptures with material he found in the sand. What are you doing? “Just messing.” He used sticks, twigs, shells, seaweed and stones to make three-dimensional figures. After he had made about four of them, he dismantled the second one he had created and started over again. Why did you take it apart? “It wasn’t the way that I wanted it.” I thought it looked nice. “But it didn’t match the image that I had in my head.”

It was a moment of departure for me. Up until that very moment, I had relied on other people, teachers, friends, colleagues, Mom, Dad, whoever, to tell me whether what I had created, reproduced or simulated … was indeed good. Or good enough. I realized that I had never approached music from the standpoint of a pre-conceived idea. Meaning, first I have the idea, then I create or reproduce the music.

In classical music, a musician has a responsibility to the composer. He or she must bear witness to the tempos, phrasing, dynamics … road signs, essentially … that the composer has taken pains to indicate. After those elements have been considered, the musician then can begin to make the piece his own, hammering away here, chiseling away there, taking time, highlighting, picking up the tempo to generate more energy and so forth.

During that hour on the beach, I awakened to a new artistic consciousness; or awareness. It was no longer sufficient “just to make it through the piece”. Nor could I any longer rely merely on the execution of the composer’s notes to “carry the piece”. I had to retrain my ears to listen for things to bring to the surface, retrain my eyes to discover hidden melodies among the visible. I had to learn to think six to eight measures ahead when playing jazz, to make sure that what I play sounds like I thought of it yesterday and that I spent the night honing it down to an elegant refinement.

It was a mind-boggling day at the beach, for sure. And it took me a while to figure out exactly how this insight would impact me and my craft. But, the way I approached the piano, and music, changed that day. I grew up. A little. It was a day to ponder over … Heavier Things.

Credits: To my friend, B., and other artists who can transfer elements of their talent to other imaginative venues. Bravo.