A lot of what the man said more generally rang true. Almost as soon as we got talking he referred to the difference between performance and just making music. Singing in our culture has become so much about performance. It has been professionalised, commercialised. We go to hear people sing, we don't sing ourselves. People used to whistle all the time. Men used to whistle in the street - not just at girls, they used to whistle tunes. You would hear them, painters, delivery men, tradesmen, just whistling as they worked. You almost never hear that now. Although we only exchanged a few words on this idea of performance versus community - and he initiated it - I realised he knew all this, that it was maybe partly why they held these sessions, to reclaim music as a community activity. Or not even reclaim. He had a live-and-let-live approach: other people can do what they want over there and that's fine, and this is what I'm doing over here.
This is not a new idea. We have Indian restaurants and Chinese, pop concerts and classical, alternative milongas and traditional [Segregation and Inclusion, Milonga-lite]. The issue comes when you have on the one hand people talking about "one big community" as though it were one thing, or even a real thing.
That is not to say there is no place for performance. Some performances entrance and entertain.
I don't know if it was coincidence or whether he had got the measure of me but having just written about that I was startled and worried he had somehow, impossibly, read those recent pieces on performance and ego which I don't advertise or refer to in daily life.
He spoke of people making music together for thousands of years, Plainly, he recognised that our culture has moved away from that, while some Latin American, African and more traditional societies societies retain it. I had the sense of someone with an intuitive grasp of what you meant whose instinct told him whether you understood him too. With him, words were more indicators than explanations. I realise now it connects with his intuitive grasp of other people. While he was laid back, fun, his partner was gentle, kind, talented. They have created something unusual and valuable in that region, and the locals are lucky to have it. It is also free. In the spirit of the thing people brought food and drink to share.
It was a wonderful feeling there and lovely listening to the musicians who were ranged about on pews in the form of a square at the sunken end of a great barn. Candles on the walls glowed on brass plates behind. The setting was special, the music wove spells through the air. In contrast to a pub people went to get drinks from the bring-and-share area at the end of the room. You could also chat outside. People came and went, in waves, as he described it.
In the barn, the idea was much the same as the pub. People took it in turns to perform their music, others usually joined in with their instruments. Occasionally a duo would lead. The setting was private, not public and yet if anything the barn felt more public. The space was bigger and more open, whereas at the local, low-ceilinged pub, it was a group of people I had met most weeks, over several months around a big candlelit table. The pub felt more intimate. There were many more people at the barn. They played better than most people at my local pubs.
The folk session at Whinlatter on the other hand had had more intimacy because so many people joined in, sang together.
It's a safe space he said. Indeed he did persuade me to join in to the
sha la la chorus of I think it was
Brown Eyed Girl. He had lots of methods though I imagine they are all improvised.
But it didn't feel safe, at least not safe enough for me.
You'll be fine, he said, seeing me teetering on the edge.
But I had tried singing once or twice at the local pub. Although people were friendly, encouraging, it hadn't felt fine, I had felt worse. We are all different and some of us seem to be outliers in our difference. Gradually, I realised that kind of community performance, where everyone takes turns might not be what I was looking for. I liked the music more, the setting was lovely, but it wasn't my community and it wasn't really singing together and without the formality of a choir.
His answer might have been that you join it once you participate but I couldn't, yet.
Later he modified his stance or changed tactic, giving the example of a someone for whom it had taken a while to participate, weeks or months. Overall, I had the sense of someone drawing me routes, of creating opportunity, maybe just for itself, maybe partly to see what I was made of. Some of us, maybe the more reserved of us, in public, balk at that.
In the barn, as in the pubs I came to realise I wanted to sing with someone else. The night camping had been too short. I had got lost in a bog, and a wood. I was tired and feeling strung out. I couldn't cope with any more stress. I had chosen to do this or been drawn to the event.
It was coming round to my turn again. I had evaded that twice already but was starting to get that
rabbit in the headlights feeling. Stress and panic were rising like toxic sap. It was the same feeling that made me
run out of salsa class a couple of years before.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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