All the music I have ever played sounded like rock bottom. The hollow reverberations against windowless walls. There was no spread; the sound didn’t scatter into a million decibels. Just lifeless, not even squirming.
This is what it felt like to lock myself away in a practice room in the basement at Emory University–the rock bottom of the building. Emory had the instruments I couldn’t afford so that’s where I practiced. And at the time, it was fine. Because I didn’t know that sunlight mattered. No one told me about Vitamin D. I didn’t know that being down there, seeing no one for 4-5 hours every day would be a defining definition of myself.
But it didn’t matter. My goal was to relate to my instruments, my practicing, not people. And to be (too) honest, it still is. I still process time with people as a waste of time not spent with my instruments. And I was sorrowful about this for quite a while. I’m not anymore. It molded my brain. It was what my psyche and emotions developed throughout childhood.
Like social media. Just like social media.
Growing up with the anticipation of getting home from school to chat with friends on AOL instant messenger. Then facebook getting blocked by administrators in high school because we were all logging on during school to stare at non-engaging pages. It’s when there was no timeline. No chat features. All we could do was stare at our profiles, then at others, and mull over the mystery of a relationship status classified as “It’s complicated.”
I’ve watched the movie telling the story of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard screwing all his friends and associates to create something that became what it is today. Then a dropout of Harvard screwing all his friends and associates to create something that became what it is today. And at the end of that day, it wasn’t much different than what I was doing in the practice room: disengaging myself from people to bond myself with myself. Instead of angling to be around and have fluffy interactions with our objects of affection, we simply lurked online instead, gazing into their photos and creating love affairs in our minds.
I had a love affair with my instruments. I didn’t just gaze at them online. Everyday I attuned myself to making flirtatious advances towards them, incrementally bringing myself closer to their inner parts. Studying the sound when I played them. Studying the physics of their rebound–the relationship of a stick or mallet to a plane that I had to manipulate my body to get a return on the gravity I’d use to strike them.
And always–always–I practiced in front of a mirror. There were things about my body that I’d have to observe, things that I wouldn’t be able to see myself just looking down. But not my head. Not my face. Not my eyes. Because I didn’t play an instrument using my mouth. I always had a disembodied relationship to what I had to look at in the mirror. Even if my face was visible, I never looked at it. It was my back, my hands, my arms, my fingers that needed attention. Still so. When I practice today, I see the body I’m using, not the face that it sits on.
In the mirror I search for the reflection of my sound. Not myself.
Look: Evolve 