The Music Lesson

by Victor L Wooten

  Whew! That was the first time I’d heard him speak with such force. He sounded like he really had a point to prove. I didn’t quite know what to say. I didn’t even know if what he said was true. Michael was silently looking at the ground, so I decided to speak up.

  “I think I understand your view on notes, so will you help me understand more about all the other elements?” I asked.

  “Yes, we will look at all the elements individually. We’ve started already, but let’s not leave the subject of ‘notes’ just yet. Let’s dive in deeper. You ready?”

  “Ready!”

  “Here we go.”

  I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. For some reason, I agreed to let this man ‘show’ me about music, and although he had some interesting ideas, I didn’t know if he really knew anything about it at all. Had he studied somewhere, or was he making it up as he went along? I sat for a short while contemplating my dilemma when my thoughts were shattered by an outburst.

  “Notes are overrated!” Michael shouted, slamming his fist into his open palm.

  “Overrated?” I asked. “I get the sense that you have more to say about the subject.”

  A lot more as it turned out.

  “Most musicians think that Music is made up of notes. They forget that notes are just a part of Music, and a small part at that. If you stopped playing them, Music would still exist. Think about that! The reason many musicians get frustrated when they start to play, especially when they start to solo, is that they rely mostly on notes to express themselves. There are only twelve notes. Imagine trying to speak a whole language using only twelve words.

  “You see, for musicians, bass players especially, groove should be most important, but groove is not found in notes. It is found in the other nine elements. The other elements, put together, define the essence of groove. That is why, when musicians try to play by twelve notes alone, they quickly run out of things to say.”

  I knew what he was talking about, and I was definitely guilty of it. Most of my musical study had been dedicated to notes, which was why I usually had a hard time playing well. Everything I knew about groove, I’d learned on my own. No teacher or book ever really told me what it was. When I thought about it, I realized Michael was showing me that groove, for the most part, doesn’t get equal attention.

  I’ve seen many books teaching notes, but I’ve yet to see a book on rest, articulation, or tone. I realized that most of the other elements we listed were rarely taught. Most musicians had to learn them on their own. This was starting to get interesting. I was getting a glimpse into the vastness of music, which made me wonder why most teachers chose to confine it to twelve notes. I hoped Michael could shed more light on the subject.

  “Many musicians,” he said, “are afraid of those twelve notes. If they hit the ‘wrong’ one, they get scared and quickly leave that note in search of the ‘right’ one. That’s what you were doing when you were trying to find the key. If you make friends with whichever note you happened to land on, it will give you directions to where you are trying to go.

  “Most inexperienced bass players have to find the root before they can play anything else. That is a very elementary way of thinking. When I asked you to play earlier, you didn’t listen to what you played. You only listened for the root, and when you didn’t hit it on your first try, you jumped around blindly until you found it.

  “Now listen,” he instructed as he walked over to my cheap electronic keyboard. "There are how many notes in Western Music?”

  “Twelve,” I answered.

  “How many notes are there in most of the key signatures we play in?”

  “Seven.”

  “Correct. In any key, there are seven so-called ‘right’ notes which leave only five so-called ‘wrong’ notes. What this means is even if we don’t know what key we are in and guess which note to play, we will be ‘right’ more than half the time.

  “Look,” he continued, pointing at the keyboard. “In the key of C major, the ‘rule book’ states that you’re allowed to play the white keys only. But what would happen if you accidentally landed on a black key? Nothing, because if you look on either side of this ‘wrong’ note, what do you see?”

  “A ‘right’ note,” I answered proudly.

  “Absolutely! You are never more than a half-step away from a ‘right’ note. Never! So, what are you so afraid of? You can’t be lost. If you land on a ‘wrong’ note, just step off of it in either direction, and you are ‘right’ again. ‘I once was lost, but now am found.’ Even if I close my eyes and throw a dart at the keyboard, I will hit a right note more than half the time. ‘Was blind, but now I see.’ ”

  His way of looking at notes caused me to see them in a new way. If I was never more than a half-step away from a ‘right’ note, like Michael had said, my world would be much easier. That was a relief. Michael read my thoughts (perhaps literally).

  "This is liberating, is it not?” he remarked. "The real beauty is this: If you use your ears and listen to that accidental note, you may find that it actually sounds better than the ‘right’ note you intended to play.”

  He walked back over to the guitar and started playing a simple groove. He looked at me, talking while he played.

  “Don’t be afraid of the notes; jump right in. All I want you to do is listen to whether the note is in the key or not. Just think ‘in’ or ‘out.’ If the note is ‘in,’ listen to it and realize where you are in relationship to the root. If the note is ‘out,’ slide your finger one fret in either direction, and voila, you are right again.”

  I picked up my bass and, without thinking, played the first note my finger landed on. It sounded horrible, so I quickly slid my finger down one fret. Michael was correct, I was now on a ‘right’ note, and it sounded good. I wanted to test his theory, so I played the same wrong note again, but this time, I slid my finger up one fret. Like before, I was on a ‘right’ note. It made me smile.

  I also noticed something else. I wasn’t sure as yet that it was really happening, so I repeated the process a few more times. I then found a different ‘wrong’ note to start on and repeated the whole process. What I noticed shocked me. I started to tell him what I’d discovered. Seeing the expression on my face, he spoke first.

  “Go ahead; tell me.”

  It was difficult to explain, but I gave it a try: “I noticed that when I went from the ‘wrong’ notes to the ‘right’ notes over and over again, it made the ‘wrong’ notes gradually sound ‘right.’ The more I did it, the ‘righter’ the ‘wrong’ notes started to sound until they didn’t sound ‘wrong’ at all anymore.”

  “Why?” he asked me. “Why didn’t those notes sound wrong anymore?”

  “Maybe it’s because the ‘wrong’ notes are leading somewhere. Repeating the ‘wrong’ note allows the listener to know where it’s going so that it begins to sound ‘right.’ ”

  I confused myself. It surprised me that Michael understood what I had just said.

  “Very nice.” He was smiling now. “I call this ‘massaging the notes.’ It’s a great way to correct mistakes after they’ve already been made. I like to think of it as a way to change the past.”

  “I like that,” I said.

  “I’ve got a million of ’em,” he responded in a comedic voice. “You can also play the ‘right’ notes so much that they start to sound ‘wrong.’ Overusing a note can sound just as bad as playing a ‘wrong’ note. Basically, every note has something to say. They all lead somewhere if you just listen to them. How you use them is the key. As I said before, the notes will tell you where they want to go. You just have to listen.”

  “I know that I don’t listen that way,” I commented.

  “I noticed,” he replied. “Many musicians study so much music theory that they only remember how to tell the notes where to go. They have learned to forget that notes are alive. I urge you to listen to the notes. They may have something to tell you.”

  I’d never thought about
listening to notes that way, to see what they had to tell me. I’d always tried to tell the notes where to go, and most of the time they seemed to resist.

  “Let me hold your bass,” he instructed.

  Michael took my bass and handed me the guitar. He asked me to play the same chords he’d been playing. Before I had to ask, he let me off the hook by telling me what they were—Gm to C7. The guitar didn’t sound the same in my hands as it did in his, but I did my best. He asked if I could play and listen at the same time. I said that I could.

  Michael started from the highest note on my bass and moved down one fret at a time, playing every note on the instrument. He then did the same thing in reverse starting from the lowest note and ending at the highest. It was simple, but against the chords I was playing, it sounded amazing.

  I’d never heard that done before. I’d also never heard my bass sound that good. My old Univox, which I’d always thought of as “beat-up,” suddenly came to life, and all he’d done was play a chromatic scale. I knew that many of the notes he played were not in the key signature and shouldn’t have sounded that good, but somehow he made them all work. I was astounded at what I was hearing.

  “Which of those notes sounded bad?” he asked with a confident smile.

  “None of them did,” I replied, still in shock.

  “Why?”

  “Because you were playing them and not me.”

  "The first truthful thing you’ve said all day. You graduate! Class over.”

  “No really, I don’t know why all the notes sounded good. I guess it was how you played them that made them work.”

  “Right again. Now, how did I play them?”

  “I don’t know. I guess you . . .”

  I couldn’t think of an appropriate answer at first, and then it hit me. I had the answer and I knew it. It was so simple that I was surprised that I’d never thought of it before that day. I didn’t even feel proud of myself for coming up with the answer because I should have known it immediately.

  “You didn’t just rely on the notes alone. You added in more of the other elements of music.” I knew that I was right, so I answered with my own smile of complete confidence.

  “Progress,” I heard him whisper, almost to himself. “We are making progress.”

  For the next few hours, we played music together, often switching between bass and guitar. What he showed me was remarkably simple. Every once in a while he would use the keyboard to demonstrate something else about notes. His proficiency on that instrument was just as stunning as it was on the guitar and the bass. The only thing that surprised me more was the fact that, until that day, I didn’t know that the keyboard still worked. Until that day, I wasn’t sure if my brain still worked either, but I was starting to get it. I was actually understanding what the crazy man was showing me.

  We massaged notes, listened to notes, directed notes, and just played notes until I was familiar and comfortable with all of them. He had me spend time with the chromatic scale, one note at a time, “listening” to what each had to say about the key we were in. Then he would change keys and have me repeat the whole process. Each note would say something different as the chord changed. That exercise was a revelation to me.

  Another exercise involved playing notes randomly, without thinking of what I was going to play first. “Just play any note,” he instructed. “Jump all over the bass as if you don’t care.” I was surprised at how hard it was to do. I had a difficult time not playing patterns. My fingers kept landing on top of the frets instead of in between them.

  “Mistakes,” he told me, “are just things we didn’t mean to play. It doesn’t mean they are ‘wrong.’ Some of the best Music I’ve ever played started out as a mistake. Mistakes usually throw us off because the note comes out before we think about it. We can’t avoid making mistakes, but we can get comfortable with them, especially if we practice making them.”

  The thought of practicing mistakes was another strange but interesting idea. I had no idea how I was supposed to practice that. Michael answered my thought.

  "This ‘random’ exercise simulates making mistakes so that they no longer affect us negatively. If we learn to play random notes cleanly, playing any pre-thought note or pattern will be a piece of cake.”

  I was learning things I’d never learned before and it was exciting. My mind was open and receptive to everything he had to say. Well, almost everything. It was exactly what I needed.

  “Play like a child with an air guitar,” Michael advised. “A child playing air guitar never plays a ‘wrong’ note.”

  For the first time in a long time, I played like a child.

  I loved it.

  MEASURE THREE

  Articulation/Duration

  Every time you move, and every time you play a note,

  a piece of yourself is left behind.

  We played for hours, just the two of us having fun. I don’t remember the last time I’d done that without expecting to get paid. Eager to learn more, I asked Michael to teach me about the other elements of music.

  “Soon,” he answered, “I have more to show you about notes first. Let’s look at them in a different way before we call it a night. How we view notes provides a good example of how we view Life.”

  “How we view life? What do you mean?”

  He played a C and a C sharp at the same time on the guitar.

  “How does that sound?” he asked.

  “Awful! It sounds like two notes clashing,” I responded with a grimace.

  “Very ordinary answer,” he said matter-of-factly. “Now, if I take the C up an octave and play the two notes again, what does it sound like now?”

  “Now it sounds pretty,” I answered. "The C became the major seventh which is a key factor in making a chord sound pretty. That’s cool.”

  “Correct. The rule book tells us that two notes played side by side, a half step apart, should clash and sound dissonant, but if we move the lower note up an octave, the same two notes sound pretty. Why is that? They are the same two notes, so how can they clash in one instance, and sound pretty in the next? There is a Life lesson in there somewhere.”

  Interesting, I thought. “So are you saying that situations in life which seem to clash may not be ‘wrong’ at all; they may just be in the wrong octave?”

  “It is you who is saying that, but I do agree. Keep going with that thought.”

  “Okay, I’ve never thought about it before, but I’ll give it a try. How about this? If we can learn to change our perspective and see negative things in a different ‘octave,’ we may be able to see the beauty in all things and in all situations. ”

  “Bravo! I’ll accept that. Very articulate, simple and to the point. All situations and all people contain beauty, but it is up to us to see it. When we don’t see it, our immediate response is to blame, then change the outer thing rather than change our perspective or our octave. It is only when we change octave that we can see things as they really are. Then, and only then, can we make a positive change when and where it needs to be made.”

  Once again, I was learning new things about music and life. I was fascinated by the way he paralleled the two. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I originally agreed to take part in this situation, but if he really meant it when he told me that he could “teach me nothing,” he sure had me fooled. Even though I’d just met him, he was already the best teacher I’d ever known, bringing out parts of me I never knew existed.

  “Here’s another way to look at these two notes,” he continued. “Let’s say that we don’t change the octave of the C or the C sharp. Let’s just surround these two notes with other notes and see what happens.