Tuning to Each Other

I was in marching band in high school. We spent a lot of time tuning. We tuned in the band room. We tuned on the field at practice. We tuned at the start of the football game and then again before we took the field to perform our show. Often, we had no true pitch to tune to. We all played the same note, and tuned to each other. And once, my band instructor said that even if every single person was out of tune, you could still hear the perfect pitch hanging there in mid-air. And tune to it.

How can perfection come from a universal imperfection? One out of tune person can't tune to himself. It would be hard to get it right with two, or three, or a handful. But with the whole band, with a big crowd of people all, a little bit flawed, but all listening to each other, all trying to get it right, all adjusting, the perfect pitch emerges.

Whenever I hear a lot of wrong notes out there in the world, I like to think that if we just choose to make music together, even if we are all a little off key, eventually, together, we will get it right.

By UserB - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1529663

Music

Music is often referred to as a language. As a musician I feel this is an accurate analogy.

When you first start to learn a new language you translate each word into your language before extracting meaning. Once you gain fluency you can read or hear a word in another language and instantly grasp the meaning without going through the intermediate step of referring back to your mother tongue.

When you first lean to read music, you learn that each note on the staff has a letter name. You also learn that the keys/strings/pitches of your instrument have corresponding letter names. You begin to play by seeing the note on the page, recognizing it as middle C, then finding middle C on your instrument. When you become fluent, you go from note on the page to note on the instrument without thinking about note name.

This is the most obvious way in which spoken language and music are similar. But I have been thinking that music, like spoken language, consists of three parts: written form, spoken/played form, and meaning. The thing is that with music sound and sense are intricately connected. You may be able to have sound without sense, but you can't have sense without sound. People don't go around silently reading books of music the way we might read a book of poetry. And this makes me wonder (poetry is a good example since rhythm and rhyme live in the world of sound) why we are so willing to do without the sound element of language.

Music could be our guide. Writing music down preserves it and allows many people to have access to it. But it isn't really music until it is performed.