Why I love music:
Music has meant a number of changing things to me over 57 years.
First, it just meant sensuality, the sonority of the trumpet, and wanting to be like my next door neighbor who played…so, my getting my unrecognized “need for love and belonging” and my “ need for esteem of others” was hard-wired in, right from the start.
My fifth-grade music teacher was the first presiding adult I had close contact with who was not abusive to me on the army bases I grew up on the first 12 years, so my “need for safety” was met. That might have some bearing on my having become a professional music teacher since I was thirteen.
I heard a four string tenor guitar that my Uncle Charles had made and let me play, when I was eleven. I instantly fell in love. The old Jewish Psalm #45 says “The music of the strings makes your heart glad”.
At thirteen, I heard Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced album” and, like millions of other guitar players, I became a musical acolyte…and still am.
Until I was 27, the most spiritual thing I would know was the bends and vibrato of Hendrix’s soloing. There I sensed something more beautiful than anything in the life I was living. “God as Beauty” works for many atheists or agnostics, as I was at the time. So, there is my “need for spirituality” being met.
Around fifteen I was making more money than any of the country boys on the neighboring farms and I bought a used 1967 Ford Mustang and I began to see music as freedom from my alcoholic parents. My “need for financial safety” was now met. ‘
At seventeen, I had explored all the commercial music that was available to me in my bucolic hometown and I became an “Artist”…through drinking two beers and discovering the interval of a major seventh. Music now became a way to meet my “need for creativity”.
At no point along the way did I find music a good way to “Hunt for girls”. The four worst musician’s I have ever played with had that motive and I found them, and their music, repugnant.
I went to the University of Virginia, studied hard for a year and a half, and was told by the Chairman of the Music Department that I should not be there, that I should study with John Cage, who I had never even heard of at that point
But, Hendrix was my role model at the time and I went on the road for four years, 19-23, as he had done, and music became my sole means to meet my financial needs…I was thoroughly miserable, and hooch consoled my stupid choices.
I also started my pedagogical friendship with John Cage, arguably the most intelligent musician since Wagner, and Beethoven before that. I heard and saw things that I had never dared even dream of musically and the die was cast.
I decided at 25 to devote myself to teaching because I was good at it, it paid well, I made my own hours and I didn’t have a boss. It has given me a humane financial life the balance of my life and my need for creativity soared because I wrote “beautiful music”, according to Cage, and I was broke as a snake and drunk as a goat…just like him.
Finally, spirituality was wrestled out of Hendrix’s hands and another power greater than myself, that I could choose myself, began to slowly seep in.
When Covid started in March of 2020 I took the time to look back at my life to see if there was anything of value that I was good at, musically, and I discovered, to my surprise, that I had a knack for the avant-garde and have been practicing that 3.75 hours a day, for well over a year.
Now, I have finally attained something I have never known in all my life, and my “ need for contentment ” is met…and I found it through music.
In all fairness, to give credit where credit is due, all the above musical diatribe is based on a deft Gandhi observation… "Religion and art have the identical aims...moral and spiritual elevation".