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9. The Continuing Importance of Musicalized Experience
- Wesleyan University Press
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C H A P T E R N I N E The ContinuingImportance of Musicalized Experience One Friday morning in September 1990, at about 10:oo A.M., I got on the North Lamar bus, heading into downtown. There were a few seats scattered throughout the bus, but, following habit, I headed for the back. Not until after I sat down did I notice a white man about my age with long hair sitting a couple of rows up. A pad of staff paper lay on his lap, and he was busy scribbling scales and drawing chord structures across its lines. From the seat in back of him, a black man leaned over and asked what he was doing. They began to talk, and I started trying to eavesdrop on the conversation. "This is what I do on the bus everyday. I ride the bus an hour and a half everyday, and I can't hardly work out this stuff at work, so that's what I do on the bus." "So what is that, is that jazz orwhat?" "Well, actually, I first heard it on a Led Zeppelin record, but yeah, a lot of jazz guys will use this. It's a melodic minor scale. You know Led Zeppelin?" "No, man, but I do play. And I'm always strugglin' to get better, you know. Are you a teacher?" "I've taught guitar for the last nineteen years, ever since I was fifteen . I'm the music director at the Austin Guitar School now. Youknow, down at the Opry House? I generallyhave students all day long, or else I'm working on the books or something, so I just don't have the time to do the studying I need to do to keep improving myown skills." "So like, if I wanted to like, get better you know, like to work on my reading and stuff, like, do you know any books that would help me with that?" By this point, I was not the only rider listeningto thisconversation; D I S S O N A N T I D E N T I T I E S / 2.38 the entire back of the bus was paying attention. A Chicano man was leaning over from across the aisle.The older African-American man sitting next to me took his cap off and tilted his head in order to hear better. I shifted over in my seat so that I could take notes and listen at the same time. The guitar teacher noticed that he had an audience by this point, and he began to speak louder. "You see, this is the only way I can ever learn anything myself.When you hear something that you like, try to play it and then write it down." He looked up to make sure we all got this point. Heads nodded all around. "And as soon as you learn something you don't really understand , you need to write a song with it. Don't learn anything else, just play this one thing and playaround with it for a couple of weeks.Write a song that forces you to use the new scale. The trick is to only play notes that are in the key. So with this progression that I've got here, where the A minor resolves out of this E major, you throw in your G sharp on the way up this scale. See how it works? Sometimes it takes me weeks to learn a new scale, and I have to really force my fingers to move in new ways. And then after I get this scale down in A minor, I change keys and do it all again until I can play it in any key I want. And that's how you learn it, by applying it. Just reading books doesn't help. Yougotta work at it." The man sitting next to me pointed at the corner of an instruction book in the teacher's lap. "That's a pretty good book, though." "Yeah, I use the Mel Baybooks with a lot of my students. But it's no substitute for practicing." Again, everyone nodded. "How much you charge, man?" asked the first questioner. "Usually about $2.0 for a half-hour lesson. But I'm not taking any new students right now. If you come on down to the school, though, we have a lot of other teachers who are really good." With this, Ted...