Together

February 25, 2019

How I ever managed to make it through high school algebra, geometry, and trigonometry I’ll never know. Today I can barely add and subtract, which is at times downright embarrassing, let lone inconvenient. Take music, for example. Though we are often moved by its beauty or whipped into action by its cadences, other than tonality and expressiveness, it is mathematics in one of its purest forms. An octave is a function of the sine curve; for example, high C is one half the wavelength of middle C. Each note has its own frequency. Music has a mathematic and scientific foundation. I can know all this, but it doesn’t really affect me directly.

It’s in the playing of the music where the trouble starts for me. I’m OK with 4/4 time; it’s pretty straightforward—each quarter note is one beat, four beats to a measure. 3/4 time, same thing, only three beats to the measure (think waltz). In 4/4 time, an eighth note gets half a beat, a dotted eighth three quarters of a beat. By this time, I’m in over my head, trying to count out rhythms that have a variety of combinations of quarter, dotted quarter, eighth, dotted eighth, etc. When a few of these carry over from one measure to another, my boat has already begun sinking, and if the composer throws in a cut time, you can look for me at the bottom of the lake. All this to say I am living proof that one doesn’t have to be good at music to appreciate it. But one does have to be good to actually play it in front of an audience. 

I’ve done some pretty odd things in my life, like sitting in front of an audience in a washtub with a shower cap on my head singing “Splish Splash, I Was Taking a Bath,” before jumping up with a towel around my waist and dancing to the song. I’ve broken ribs when I went head over heels off my motorcycle after running into a lilac bush in my back yard. I don’t mind looking foolish in front of others. But I do mind making the others in the band look bad by making a mess of my part. In our New Horizons concert band, our conductor encourages us old folks by telling us that if we can’t play all the notes in front of us, don’t worry; play the notes you can, and your neighbor will pick up the rest. But for me, there is no neighbor. If I don’t get them, they won’t be gotten. 

Am I nervous? You bet I am! I’m working hard, but if you can’t count the beat, it’s pretty hard to play the right note where it’s supposed to be. And if that doesn’t happen, chaos can descend pretty quickly. 

Life is like that. It wouldn’t be so bad if we could just amble along at our own pace, not worrying about anyone else, but we live in communities, in families, in churches and workplaces. If we don’t play our role in the right way, at the right time, others are affected. Our success or failure can spell the difference between someone else’s success or failure. I’m practicing, listening to the music on YouTube, and practicing some more. I hope to be able to do it well enough to allow the others to shine. In life as well as on stage.