Not Everything Can Be So Critical

Something must give.

That’s critical as in of excruciating importance and then the critical that begets: criticism.

I can ere in the side of rigidly clinging to the way things should be done.

Sloppy and lazy irk me.

So, when it comes to piano lessons, we finally found a teacher who believes in reading music properly– not by numbers or letters but notes. She focuses on the notations like Mezzo Forte and Staccato and all the directions given by the composer.

This agrees with my sense of right and proper process.

It’s like learning to read. If you memorize one text and then another but never learn what comprises a word or sentence, the subtleties of punctuation and prosody– the directions that constitute reading, the world is NOT your oyster.

You do NOT have access to a world of musical possibility.

We had been engaged on this path for a couple months, with not a lot of joy, frivolity or frolicking good time surrounding practice time.

The boys can read music.

But, because they’ve learned to play more by ear and through a variety of questionable methods, they don’t really read the music so much as learn it and then play while watching squirrels out the font picture window.

Finally, the other morning, I gave up.

Exhausted hearing myself repeat for the umpteenth time chide them: She told you to read the music. The composer wrote out directions for a reason. You need to learn how to play by the rules before you make up your own… and other exciting variations on this theme…

I gave up.

Finn is singing Lean On Me for the school chorale recital. So he started playing it by ear. He had my phone and I could hear him looking up different versions of the song to help him teach himself what he was missing.

And then it got quiet.

I assumed there was some crazy squirrel race going on outside and I didn’t have it in me to tell him to stick with it, keep going, and not give up.

He came into the kitchen crying.

He handed me my phone and said he wanted to play something for me. He hit play and my eyes filled up immediately.

The General President of the Teamsters introduced Christopher Duffley, a blind 10-year-old boy who sang, Lean On Me. His performance was incredible. His bravery, generous spirit, kind heart and fearless delivery were all deeply inspiring.

But, the way this little boy sang those lyrics awakened something inside me.

I have not heard them in a long time and never with such clarity of meaning and heart as I did listening with Finn this week.

I have included the first third of them here:

Some times in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow, but, if we are wise, we know that there’s, always tomorrow. Lean on me, if you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on, for, it won’t be long, till I’m going to need, somebody to lean on. Please, swallow your pride, if I have things, you need to borrow, for, no one can feel, those of your needs, that you won’t let show. Yeah you just call on me brother, if you need a hand, we all need somebody to lean on. I just might have a problem that you’d understand, we all need somebody to lean on…

It melted me.

Something released inside me. And I gave up. Not my quest for our boys to pursue piano with passion and excellence but my rather rigid way of thinking that there is one right way for that to happen.

What is more critical than learning to read music is learning to love music and the humanity behind it.