If you know me at all, you know that I really enjoy listening to Kate Shepherd’s “Creative Genius Podcast”. The most recent episode was an interview with Meredith Hite Estevez. Meredith is, among many things, a musician. She holds a doctorate in Oboe from Juilliard. During the interview they discuss how, in many settings, the study of classical music can kind of drain the joy and the love of music out of someone, especially in an elite environment such as Juilliard. Where it becomes about perfection and mastery and there are right and wrong ways of doing things. She acknowledges that a certain amount of mentorship and teaching are essential to learning the craft, but it can easily become a burden, too. A constant trying to meet expectations can lead you to a place where maybe you never wanted to be. Playing in an orchestra, when you want to play in a jazz ensemble. I think we all wind up there to a certain degree at times in our lives.
One of the things they talked about to try and get out of that rut is a “return to basics” sort of thought. Anyone who has studied music is familiar with practicing scales. Scales are fundamental practice. You never stop playing scales unless you stop playing music altogether. You use scales to engage that connection between the brain and the body. It moves the blood to the necessary areas of your body that allow you to make music. Your hands, your arms, your vocal folds, your diaphragm muscles, even your legs and feet if you are playing pedals on a piano, or an organ or a kick drum or high hat. Scales allow you to know which notes to play in different key signatures. Knowing your scales is essential for playing correctly what is written in the music in front of you, but knowing those scales also allows you to know where you can break the rules in music, too. Ask any songwriter or composer and they will tell you the same.
In the music world there are these fundamentals that everyone knows. Everyone is familiar with. Another of these is that orchestras tune to the note A-440. This note is a constant, it is always the same. 440 Hz has always been and will always be 440 Hz. In tuning your instrument, you have to make adjustments until you find A-440 to be in tune. You tighten or loosen a string or you move a piece on your instrument in or out, believe it or not, even drums have to be tuned by tightening or loosening the screws that hold the drum head in place. It’s the constant search for that one fundamental frequency that will always be the same. Even during the course of a performance you may still need to be constantly making adjustments because your instrument will warm up and cool down as you are blowing into it, or your strings may stretch or loosen as you play.
So, that got me thinking about it in a metaphorical sense. That question, “Where is A-440?” What are the things that are essential to ground you into your daily life and into your practice of being creative? What is fundamental? What does “running scales” look like to you? How can we apply this idea? I know that for me, one of the biggest things is having a predictable schedule. When I don’t have that predictability, it’s like I’m that kid that was jumping on the trampoline with the rest of the kids and fell down and everyone else kept jumping and the kid who fell is just bounced around like a rag doll and can’t get any footing to stand up again. This was especially true after the panic attack last fall. It was hard enough to just stand up, much less try to stand when the world around me was bouncing to and fro. It’s one of the main reasons I had to make the choice to leave. I just needed a stability that could no longer be found there and did not seem as if it would ever be that way again. Along the way, I am still looking for those other “A-440” fundamentals and maybe that will always be a question for me. But… just as a musician gets better at tuning their instrument with practice, I hope that finding “A-440” will become easier the more I practice looking for it.
What about you, what are your “A-440” things?