This was originally supposed to be a videotaped conversation. But the video quality was poor—definitely a result of user ignorance (moi). Maybe it could become an audio interview? But the audio quality wasn’t so hot either; my daughter thinks it’s because Apple doesn’t support my iPhone any more—1st gen SE—and so all its various functions eventually just go to pot. Ah, technology! Friend and foe. We were able to extract a short audio file—it’s at the end of this post--of a little round we sang together.
This was a conversation between me and two of my daughters, Lucia and Flavia. We appear in the transcript below as M, L, and F.
M: I wanted to talk about some ideas and experiences related to the fact that we emphasized music in our home as you were growing up. Would you agree with that premise—that music was emphasized in our home?
L: Sure.
F: Oh yeah.
M: So two big questions: I’m wondering if you could reflect on what that meant for you growing up, AND on how that’s impacted your adult lives?
L: For me, growing up, it meant listening to a lot of different kinds of music, seeing performances of a lot of different kinds of music, and playing a lot of music.
We were growing up when music was on CDs, and I remember some cassette tapes and record albums too. Mom, you played a lot of different music from around the world for us. I remember Sugar Belly and his DIY homemade saxophone, Georgian polyphonic choirs, traditional American folk music, west African drumming, Renaissance music. You learn a lot listening to music from different places and times. I can hear music now and a lot of times I can place it in some way, like, This sounds like it’s from southeast Asia, or this sounds Ghanaian. Curating the music in an environment informs the way you feel on a day-to-day basis. It can set the tone or mood of a day, or a drive, or an experience.
We had a family friend who was an instrument maker. Some of his instruments were really simple and others were ambitious and complex, but it all kind of demystified and broadened my sense of making sounds and how fun that can be. The older kids in our family studied string instruments with Suzuki method teachers. That way of learning an instrument includes a lot of parental involvement. You have to oversee the child’s practice for years. Now I have some young students in my own teaching studio who are taking lessons with their parents. Learning music together like that is a great way to share something special with your child. We did that, Mom, when you and all us kids took African drumming lessons with a master Nigerian drummer.
M: I was the dumbest kid in the class!
L: In my adult life, I’m a musician, so obviously for me, music is a huge part of my life. It’s impossible for me to detangle my experiences with music and my love for my music from my self-identity; it’s who I am. I went to music school, and that conditioned me so much. The way I listen to music and analyze music—I’m basically always analyzing music. I had a professor in the beginning of college who said, “You’ll never hear music in the same way once you start learning how to analyze it.” That’s sort of true for me; I don’t totally agree with him because I can turn that off when I want to. But it’s also always there if I want to tap into it.
If you’re analyzing music all the time, if you’re judging it all the time, it can really flatten the experience, it can really cancel out the heart and soul. If I see a local band playing on a street corner, I might think, with my music analysis mind, the guitar player is not really in tune, his solo isn’t really fitting into the chord changes, they’re not really totally together. But I can flip off that music analysis/judgmental switch and say: Awesome! This is creating a great vibe and people are really enjoying this. It’s great to see people enjoy playing music together, to see other people feel good about them playing music together. They’re offering this to their community and the community is enjoying it and they’re creating this good energy. It’s one of the superpowers of music—bringing people together in a positive way, even people that don’t know each other. I think, as a musician, it can be important to turn off the judgmental thing. I don’t think it always serves. I saw that in a lot of my music professors: They were judging music all the time. That can really prevent you from getting to the heart of what music is about.
That’s why that willingness to turn the music analysis and judgment off is important. Sometimes, often, I want to approach a musical experience just to appreciate what it offers in the broadest possible sense.
F: I did not go to music school!
To answer your question about growing up with a lot of music, as a kid, I felt like a lot of our community and socializing experiences were music-based: We sang in a chorus, we played in ensembles, we went to music camps, we sang with the San Francisco Opera, we did Sing Thing* every week. Especially being homeschooled, music was the primary way we socialized and connected with the community. Even the Red Shoes** was very community-based.
My college education was unusual. [M: Flavia went to a great books program.] Everyone was required to take a year of music when we were sophomores. We studied an opera and a symphony, we studied counterpoint, we studied ancient Greek music. That was really interesting, because some of the people in the class had never studied or played music at all. I was a TA for that class, and we were explaining stuff like, What is a note? What is a scale? What is major and minor in the Western canon?
That major and minor idea is illustrative. Our music professor, in discussing the difference between major and minor, said something that I felt was pretty misleading. He said, “The Germans described major as loud, and minor as soft.” He played this clip of music where there was a modulation from a major to a minor key and back again, but there was also a crescendo in the minor key and a decrescendo into the major key. So it got louder during the minor, and got softer going into the major, and my classmates were like, “I get it now! When it got really loud, that was major.” The exact opposite of what actually happened in the music! So that loud/soft idea didn’t really serve them.
We had learned as kids that minor sounds sad, major sounds happy—also simplistic, but maybe a more useful way to distinguish for the Western ear. It makes a lot more sense to me.
L: Totally.
F: But it was all a really interesting experience because it showed me that some people have absolutely no reference point for music—playing it, singing it, studying it—whatsoever. They didn’t know how to read or play music, but they also didn’t have access to basic musical concepts that you have in your body, like what rhythm is, what it feels like. So for those people, the only way they encounter music is by listening to it. There’s no analysis, no creating your own music—or if you are making music, you’re singing along to something recorded. You’re not just singing; it’s always scaffolded in that way with someone else’s recording and phrasing and interpretation.
A few days ago, I had a couple of friends over. One of them, Lydia, has been wanting to sing more. So we started singing some rounds. It was nice for me because I have this reference point, I know lots of rounds, and I got to share them with friends who were interested. Another reminder of how community-oriented making music is.
M: Rounds were a big part of what we did in Sing Thing*. They were really fun to sing, they were accessible to singers of all ages, and they sounded really cool. I’m so glad you’re singing rounds with your friends! That makes my heart really happy.
That whole phenomenon of people being fluent or not in music is really interesting, and I think it’s different for different generations. During the Big Band era, jazz music was popular music. People from all social classes would go out dancing to live music on weekends. It was what you did. It meant that everyone was fluent rhythmically, because you couldn’t dance in a social setting to that kind of music unless you were. It’s not the same now. There’s not that same unifying thing through the dance and its music.
Another piece is that people sang more then; they knew more songs, and they knew more songs in common with other people. I read recently that the only song many people know all the way through, and the only song they sing with other people is “Happy Birthday.”
F: I was at a birthday party recently. I sang a starting note so we could all start singing “Happy Birthday” on the same note, and we absolutely didn’t! Some people didn’t even sing it all the way through.
M: You mean they just petered out?
F: Yeah, they just petered out.
L: That’s kinda sad.
F: They were also playing recorded music in the restaurant we were in, so that can be hard—to try to sing your own thing while some other musical thing is going on.
L: “Happy Birthday” really exposes everybody’s musical vulnerabilities. Matching a note can be hard. I know people who are great musicians but they can’t match a note vocally. Especially the drummers. No shade on drummers; we love drummers! But I have noticed that playing certain instruments—and it can be melodic instruments too—if you never have to sing, you don’t necessarily learn to sing in tune or match a note.
M: They’re adjacent skills, but they’re not the same, that’s for sure.
L: I do think, for kids, listening to music, singing, playing music has a whole range of great benefits. It can really help with memory and with learning things quickly. It’s a language. So if you’re fluent musically—and I have nothing to back this up; it’s just a sense I have—it can help you in picking up languages. That’s been true for me. I kind of know how to navigate in another language—at least in a rudimentary way—because of music. For really young children, just learning to speak, I think that process can really be helped along by learning through song.
M: I think there’s a spiritual element too. Shinichi Suzuki, the guy who invented the Suzuki method, wrote a book called Nurtured By Love. The idea was that learning and working with beautiful music in a positive environment with a lot of encouragement results in skillful, talented musicians with generous, beautiful hearts. Suzuki believed that talent was built incrementally, guided, nourished; he called his music learning system “talent education.” You access, communicate, and express love through music—love of the music, of course, but also love of other people, love of peace, love of nature.
I think it’s big and the implications of studying music are big. I think it’s heart expanding in a very particular kind of way.
L: For sure. Every religious practice includes special music.
M: Music has the ability to crack you open in a very profound, spiritual way.
L: I was talking to one of my students recently about how much I appreciate movie soundtracks for the way they enhance a scene. A lot of soundtracks are written so that you’re not supposed to be aware that music is happening, but they’re designed to get you feeling specific emotions. Oftentimes, when you’re watching something, you might not even notice that the music is creeping in, but it’s working on you, amplifying your emotional experience of that scene. It’s very important in romantic or heartfelt moments, but also in moments of horror or surprise or suspense or shock. It’s very cool to think that sound influences our emotions like that. Everybody has those kinds of experiences with music. I’m biased, but I do think that music is one of the most universal arts. Everybody has music that they love, what they think of as the soundtrack to their life. We each curate our own life soundtrack. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t listen to music. I’m sure there are a few….
F: I’m sure they exist. And that they’re psychopaths.
That makes me think of the first time Lucia and I were in Italy. We spoke so little Italian! We stayed at our friend’s house and there was a family from Romania staying there too. They didn’t speak much Italian either. So we had no language in common. But Lucia had her violin. So she played a song and one of the little Romanian boys said, “I’m going to cry. It’s so beautiful!” Then the Romanians sang us one of their songs.
L: It was a beautiful exchange!
F: It was a way to interact without speaking a common language.
L: It’s funny that my violin actually served a purpose. I can’t believe that I lugged that thing all around Europe with me…
F: You played it like, twice!
L:…I played it like, twice, the whole time! But it really helped both times.
The other time, we were at these people’s house and we had made this huge meal at 11:30 pm. We weren’t hungry at that hour, but we were trying to eat anyway to be polite. It was delicious, but we just didn’t have any appetite. We crossed that line from eating food being enjoyable to being torturous—not just because it was 11:30, but because we were expected to eat sooooo muuuch food!! We finally finished the meal—what a relief!!—and our hostess takes this huge cake out of the fridge!! In my head, I was like, Oh my God! I said: “Why don’t I play you all something on my violin?” So I got up and played because if I ate one more bite, I was going to burst. It bought me enough time to digest so that when I was done playing, I was able to eat some cake.
F: The people we were staying with also had a family friend who built his own violins; he even built a cello. He was in his 90s. He was so excited to learn that we played violin and cello!
L: His son took us to visit him. It was his hobby to make violins and cellos.
F: He had never been formally trained. You could see it; for example, the necks on the violins were chunky. The instruments were a little off visually, a little disproportionate. But we played his instruments for him. He said, “This has been a dream throughout my life! That someone would play my instruments!” He was so happy!
L: It was a really important moment for him. He was crying.
There were also some really funny moments. He was blind, and going deaf, so it was hard for him to orient himself in relation to other people. He’d face the wall and yell, “Thank you very much!” thinking he was facing us. His son would gently turn him in the right direction.
F: There was another time when they were telling us their family history in Italian. I had no idea what they were saying.
L: They were narrating while they were showing us pictures in this family photo album.
F: They pointed to this picture of a teenage girl. She was really beautiful. I smiled and said, “Wow! She’s really beautiful!”
Then Lucia said, “They’re saying that she died when she was 16.” So I had to go from Wow! to Oh no! to respect the new information. Reaction whiplash. I gave them reaction whiplash.
L: Those interactions were really beautiful and sweet. And music really was the connector for us.
It can be a real pain to travel with your instrument, but when I’ve done it, and I take advantage of those opportunities to play for and with others, it often creates a very special memory and imprints people with something lovely and shared to remember. It’s more special because a lot of people don’t hear live music very often unless you move in that world. Or unless you make a concerted effort to go to live shows.
F: It’s really different to make music with other people than it is to listen to others do it. It also seems like it used to be a lot more common, and now it’s a pastime that’s disappearing. It seems like it was really something that normal, everyday people would have experienced in their everyday lives. You could go to your friend’s house and someone knew how to play piano, and there would be a piano, and you could sing around the piano together. Or someone played guitar, and people could sing together accompanied by the guitar. It’s a really different experience now where the opportunities to make music seem to be disappearing because people don’t do it as frequently as they used to.
L: Or people feel that it’s not accessible.
F: Or people feel like they’d be out of tune, so they’d rather not sing at all. I think part of being musical is the ability to sing, and to sing with other people.
M: It feels like part of our inheritance as humans.
L: Ideally, you start doing it early enough so that you’re unselfconscious about it. Otherwise, for a lot of people, that’s going to be a big hurdle to clear. It can be easier if you start when you’re a kid, but it’s not the only way in to having a musical life. As a teacher, I hear a lot of my adult students say, “Oh I wish I could learn that, but I’m too old.” You’re not too old!! It’s just about how much you want to do it and how much time you’re willing and able to commit to it. The older we get, the less used we are to not being good at what we do, so it’s unsettling to be a rank beginner. It really throws adults out of their comfort zone to not be good at something. And so, a lot of them will give up. And/or, adults will feel that they don’t have the time to work on something that’s new for them. I’ve had so many short stints with adult music students who can’t or won’t commit the time. You need to make a consistent effort. It doesn’t have to be every day, but it probably can’t be less than three times a week. When people don’t have that consistency, they don’t see progress and they give up.
I do think that, if you start playing and singing as a kid, you’re not caught up in that self-critical talk, like, That doesn’t sound good or I’m not doing it right. You can develop some skills without dealing with the inner critic that we adults have.
So that’s a real benefit to having music played around you and participating in musicmaking when you’re a child. It also teaches you, from a young age, that you can learn.
M: How do you think people could incorporate more singing and musicmaking into their lives?
L: I think there are groups that you can seek out that are making music in all kinds of different ways.
M: I remember when we used to go to the San Francisco Free Folk Festival every year, I was amazed at the variety of groups out there, many of them really casual and welcoming. There were shape note singers, and world harmony singers, and people who got together to sing rounds.
L: Yeah, having some friends who just decide they want to sing rounds together, like Flavia and her friends are doing, is a great way in.
Also, lessons are great! Obviously, I’m biased.
F: She teaches lessons.
L: I also teach online!*** It gives you that extra organization and motivation that can be really helpful and inspiring. I had lessons, all the kids in our family had music lessons.
F: We were so young when we started. I can’t pull up a memory when music wasn’t a part of my life.
L: The music industry has made something local and shared into a big moneymaker. They control how music is distributed and how music is ingested.
F: And what music is pushed. Even Spotify’s algorithm—which I think has changed over time, gotten worse—seems to push certain songs. I’ll select a song from a specific artist, and then Spotify will play something totally different, and I’m like, How did it get there from what I chose? And then, after a couple of weeks, it will stop pushing that song and it will start pushing a new song that’s also unrelated to what I’m choosing to listen to. So streaming services and the radio push specific songs and specific kinds of music. And what they’re pushing—it’s not for fun, it’s not to broaden your musical horizons, it’s for profit.
So the music you’re encountering, if you don’t make music yourself or seek out quirky, off-the-beaten path stuff to listen to, is getting more limited. Getting out of that can be hard.
Tik Tok too. Tik Tok has what it calls Sounds. They’re not whole songs, they’re just song snippets. Sounds will trend, and when they’re trending, you’ll hear them nonstop for two weeks, three weeks. Kate Bush, for example, with Running Up That Hill was trending a year or two ago. It played in a TV show that was really popular at that time, so it became a trend on Tik Tok, and that Sound was sooooo overplayed. I’m sure somebody made a ton of money from that. But it became unbearable to listen to the song because you were bombarded by it nonstop.
It's unfortunate because it’s a good song. It sucks the life out of a song to hear this one snippet played over and over and over. So I think the way people are experiencing music through these technologies is changing our relationship to music.
M: Maybe in ways that we don’t even understand at this point.
L: I definitely think you need to be able to shift and move with all the changes. The Spotify thing is definitely hard for artists. It’s controversial among musicians, because only artists who get hundreds of thousands to millions to billions of streams make any money.
F: And those are going to be artists who are already huge.
L: Right! For independent musicians, Spotify is a tough place to get anything off the ground. It’s almost impossible to be discovered any more, to be a good or original musician and get recognized for that. You know how artists used to get discovered? That really doesn’t happen any more. Basically any musician who is a star has been laser-focused on that path for a long time. They’ve had the right team and the right money and the right backing to get them there, probably from the age of 12 or younger.
M: Ugh. Feels so cynical!
L: On the other hand, social media gives artists an opportunity to market themselves and that can work for some people. Back in the day, the only way to get something like that kind of exposure would be to tour, which is exhausting and hard. So there are pros and cons to the role of technology. How do you navigate it? It’s like people deciding they want more musicmaking in their life and then they need to figure out how to do that.
M: I’m aware of how lucky we are in the Bay Area to have all these different kinds of world music performed by artists who are really accomplished in their niche genres. But realistically, how often do I get out in a month or even a year to take advantage of that? I just don’t make it happen very much.
L: Yeah, it’s also often really expensive to see live shows in the Bay Area. You can easily spend 100 bucks a person to see a live show. That makes it tough.
M: I’m thinking of Ashkenaz in Berkeley. It’s a venue that’s been around for more than 50 years. Every week, it has participatory folk dancing events, other participatory dance events, music performances, opportunities to sing, and dance and music classes at much more affordable prices. It also has fun one-off events, like the Lord of The Rings Halloween costume square dance. That model of a participatory, celebratory community dance and music space—who knows if it could even be replicated today with sky-high real estate prices and everything more complicated than it was decades ago? But wouldn’t it be something if every community in the country, or every other community, could have a space like Ashkenaz?
L: So many good ideas are priced out. Artists are priced out of places, people that want to start something like Ashkenaz are priced out. That’s a big part of the challenge right now. Also, the emphasis is on big, globalized projects. Localized community projects like Ashkenaz are a lot rarer.
M: Rare and precious.
Any other thoughts about music you’d like to share?
L: It’s never to late to start!!
F: Definitely.
L: If you’ve been thinking about playing music or you’ve always wanted to or you have a guitar lying around gathering dust, it’s important to know that you can start, you can improve, you can get better, you can learn to have fun playing with other people. But you have to be willing to not be good at it right away, and you have to be willing to commit to practicing.
I have a guitar student in his 60s. He’s been taking lessons with me for about two months. Last week, he had a real breakthrough. He learned to switch chords with fluency, something he worried that he would never be able to do. He was really consistent in his practice, and it paid off. If you’re faithful about playing, you’ll see results.
*Sing Thing, run by Sandi Morey, happened weekly in various Bay Area locations. She taught aurally—there were no papers or sheets to read from—and we learned rounds, shanties, folk songs, and story songs. Sandi accompanied on guitar. She had an unusual repertoire, and it was a great opportunity to have fun singing in a relaxed, non-performance-oriented environment. Sandi still does a weekly Sing Thing in Oakland.
**The Red Shoes was Lucia and Flavia’s performance ensemble during high school and in early community college years. They sang, Lucia played fiddle/violin, and Flavia played cello. They played all kinds of gigs from children’s programming in libraries to community music venues to music festivals. They cut a CD called—wait for it--The Red Shoes.
***Lucia offers lessons in violin, guitar, and voice to adults and children of all ages, both in person in the Bay Area, and online. If you’re interested in learning more about lessons with Lucia, you can email her at lpurpont@gmail.com. Lucia’s band, The Ladles, are touring the east coast this summer. They will be adding tour dates here. You can hear what they sound like here and here.
Here we are, mother and daughters, singing Oh How Lovely Is The Evening:
I love this in so many ways, including every blade of grass in that lawn, every memory of that lawn concert and that chair I haven't seen in 20+ years!!!
Such a lovely post! Though I never learned to read music, our five children were blessed to have musical training. Homeschooling gave them enough time to play their instruments at leisure, and often together. We sang in church and around the table and in the car on long camping trips. Two of the daughters taught piano, one of them for decades.
What a good idea you had, to set up this conversation. Your daughters probably enjoyed thinking together with you about all the good things that contributed to your rich musical life and legacy. And I love that particular round, which our family also sang. Thank you! <3