A Touch of Class

The Way of Music

Molly asked me to post this excerpt from a letter I wrote somewhere public, so here we are.

Dear Rachel,

[…] So the fourth thing. The fourth thing isn’t something I can send you, but rather something you have to find yourself. It's music, the kind that comes from you rather than to you. I don't know if this is something you need to find right now, but I want you to know it's there for when you do.

For me it looked like learning to play my favorite song on the guitar. I don't even play the guitar, but I played the piano growing up, so I knew at least a little bit about notes and fingering. So one day several months after, I decided I was going to learn to play this song. I went out and, after trying several guitars in several different shops, bought a guitar, printed out the full guitar tabs, and started at Measure 1. (A measure in music is like a phrase in a sentence. A musical “sentence” is made up of several measures, and a verse is made of several “sentences”.)

The song was “Radical Dreamers” from a video game named Chrono Cross. It's a beautiful piece of music, and it is definitely not a beginner’s song. But a little bit of stubbornness, applied consistently, can take you a long way. I just started with Measure 1 and practiced until I could play it, and the next day I added Measure 2… It took me 3–4 months, but in the end I could play the song all the way through, with just a bit of stumbling around the more complicated measures.

Music is like that: it always moves forward. As long as you're practicing, you keep getting better. It doesn't matter if the rest of your life seems to have fallen apart, and you’re not sure if you can put it back together; the music always comes together, it always moves forward, it always sings back to you so long as you practice a little bit each day. You give it a little bit more stubbornness, and it gives you back a little bit more song.

If you want to go looking for music […] I think strings are particularly nice when you're sick; because unlike winds and percussion, they don't require much strength. And you can physically hug the chords and feel them in a way you can’t with electronics, which I find pleasantly reassuring. But really it’s about finding a song you love and an instrument that pulls you to play whenever you see it, and remembering that a little bit of stubbornness can take you all the way.