Guitar Lessons Chapter 7: Hearing the World as Music
The next excerpt from a novel in progress
Teacher called me a week before our first lesson with some preliminary instructions.
“Until we meet, you are not to touch a guitar,” he said. “Your assignment is simply to listen to everything you hear throughout the day. Notice the random sounds that you encounter in daily life. Tune in to your sonic environment. Listen to the roar of the city buses, to car tires on wet pavement, to screaming children, to barking dogs. Any sound. Every sound.”
I had no idea how to respond.
“Above all, listen to conversations,” Teacher added. “Ignore their content and just notice the tone, pitch, pace, and intensity of the voices. If you are alert, you will hear a hundred melodies every day. This is where music comes from — human conversation, the deep meeting of human beings. Music is human speech with the words omitted. When you listen beyond the words, you hear pitch, tone color, melody, rhythm. And when you play guitar well, you speak to your listeners through exactly the same elements — as effortlessly as you speak through words."
“Really?” I asked. “That’s all you want me to do? Just listen to random sounds?”
“You speak as if this is something that’s easy to do. Just wait until you make your first attempt. It will be enlightening, I assure you.”
For this I had no reply.
“Don’t even bother to pick up a guitar again until you’ve done this,” Teacher said. Then he hung up.
Thus began my guitar lessons.
I want to document and share everything I learned from Teacher. But first, a caveat.
Teacher left the country many years ago and ceased all contact with his students. Where does he live now? Does he still teach? Is he still alive? I have no idea and no way to find out. Teacher disappeared under mysterious circumstances and shared only a fraction of what he knew.
If Teacher is dead, then so is most of his knowledge. All that remains are the fragments I can recall. These I captured in a personal journal that I kept during my guitar lessons, a record which by necessity is biased and incomplete.
Rereading those journal entries now, I see their shortcomings. They were written hastily in a variety of circumstances and emotional states — during post-midnight drinking sessions and morning hangovers; during bouts of resignation, joy, and rage; during brief periods of aching clarity. I’ve tried to recast those scattered notes into a coherent story, and this meager attempt — the story that follows — is all I have to offer you.
It’s possible, of course, that I’ve distorted Teacher’s ideas. His manner of communicating was obtuse and deliberately confusing — the way of the sly man. And it’s impossible for me to this man’s personal presence, a revelation in itself, in mere words.
You might, however, find something in my story that resonates with you and summons the gods of Music to fly through your front door. If so, I would write this all again, a thousand times over.