I've always been the musical type. It's a constant in a life of constant changes. However, I've never known quite well why this was the case. Music has always been a source of happiness (or extreme annoyance when it comes to bad music). Since I was very little, my father, who is another music enthusiast, has stimulated me with music and sound. We used to listen to classical music on the radio, and then he has taught me very early to recognize perfectly all the different orchestra music instruments. It was natural and easy for me.
Also, and I've never thought about that link either, I've learned how to read and write by myself, at the age of three. Letters are graphic elements, but what really fascinated and made a lot of sense for that 3 years old me was the logic tying letter combinations and sound. This Eureka moment has probably been the most incredible discover I've ever did.
As the years have passed, I've heard tons of music. The reason I love radio so much is that fact someone is always preparing a playlist for you. You can travel across these songs, enjoying them individually, but also the craftsmanship with which someone has created a specific sequence. Internet has really turned magic to me when it became an immediate source of endless streams of music of any kind. When living by myself in Denmark, I've discovered and loved Pandora. A simple idea of an algorithm that could present you with brand new but related songs to the ones you've pointed out has become an addiction, company, friendship. And in the meantime it has absurdly enlarged the number of songs in my memory. Songs that invariably when not playing in some device of mine are constantly being played in my mind.
Playing music instruments has always also been something I've loved. The discovery about instruments was that I've also have some special talent. I can reproduce any melody on any instrument by only hearing it once. So again, at a very young age, I was able to sit at the piano and play any song (as long as execution wasn't limited by motor coordination issues). But this ability has been both a blessing and a curse in my musical education. Because I've got a perfect relative ear, reading music has always felt like something unnecessary, boring and basically frustrating. It was like turning a beautiful, flowing and natural bike ride through a beautiful scenario into going down a the same road with massive traffic, when thinking about your relative position to the other drivers is annoyingly demanding and really takes all the experience flow away.
Of course a lot of practice could actually make reading music a very valuable tool in my music skills. But music has become a sort of a holly ground or a temple, from which I didn't want to take the magic feel away. On the other hand, music is also social. It's about playing to others, providing them a fraction of your great experience producing music. Plus there's playing together, which can also provide the magic feeling of building something lovely out of thin air, together.
However, music as a social interaction shares a lot with all the other social interaction experiences. There has to be agreement about what and how music will be played. Tone is the common denominator for doing so. In these regards, sheet music is a great aid. It guarantees that with minimum instrument knowledge, it's possible to coordinate playing efforts, hopefully producing a pleasant finished product: the musical execution.
Not only it's possible, but it's actually very common, especially in popular music, that musicians are totally intuitive like myself, being able to play together by combining perceptions until they finally reach the common denominator, just by listening to each other. This isn't that difficult when it comes to acoustic instruments if people have the perception skills and are able to translate them into the instrument language.
But once electric/electronic instruments come to play, they usually bring along their speakers. These are great for letting music have increased reach. On the other hand, it will kill people's natural ability to hear each other, and even to hear what they are doing. There are many ways this shortcomings can be overcome. People can rehearse so much, that their own feedback becomes a bit less critical. They can also use auxiliar speakers that allow them to hear what they are playing, no matter how much noise there is around them. I've never had access to such a system that could be good enough for a clear self-perception.
For these reasons, playing at random gigs with friends has often being very frustrating. Because even if I knew the song by heart, and I've had some notion about what my band fellow players were doing, I'd have to stick to the programmed melody, because not having any self feedback, I'm not able to improvise, since my ability to make the notes fit is absolutely tied to hearing. And until yesterday, I've never seen any connection between how frustrating these experiences usually were, and how they were connected with disability matters.
Yesterday was different. We had not been rehearsing together for quite a while. Not only I couldn't remember the melodies we would usually play. I couldn't relearn them on the fly, which I can easely do when I can hear what I'm playing. Maybe awareness about all these issues has finally clicked because just before the gig I was playing at a friends place, with many of the same guys that now were at the stage with me. Half an hour early I was happily directing music where I wanted it to go. Not only the one that came out of my saxophone. I was also leading everybody else to collaborate to a melody that would perfectly fir the chords coming from a guitar (acoustic).
At that stage I felt disabled for a second time. It's funny how neatly the experiences have connected, making total sense. As with the other of my life, there's always been this very fragile balance between what I could do and how and what the abled bodied people around would think about what they would perceive compared to their expectations.
I was exposed on that stage. The ones that go on stage usually know what they are doing (at least they think they do). And the audience expect them to know their think, and produce music which is compatible to their expectations. It's funny that most people are not particularly musical or gifted for that although it's really rare to meet people that are indifferent to music, or that don't have a pretty large amount of music in their lives. That truth creates information asymmetry between the musicians and most of their audience. People have a vague perception about the quality of the music they hear but they usually don't know the basic elements behind this perception of quality, or the root causes of problems with that perceived quality.
So crappy played usually doesn't go unnoticed. It creates a feeling of annoyance. But usually the people that get more bothered about bad playing are the musicians themselves. Up that stage I've felt disabled and I knew that playing anything just for the sake of it was going to further disable the band. My other musical instruments, other than the sax, the flute and the clarinet is the piano. The piano has a great advantage when playing in deaf mode. It's a very visual instruments, and even if you're not hearing that much, you can still play with these visual cues.
I was standing there in front of the crowd and I didn't know what else to do. I'd look at my fellow players for some sort of emotional comfort. I think they knew what was going on to a certain extent. Especially the ones that had seen me playing simple but coherent stuff a short while before. I was kind of shamed, although I knew it wasn't my fault, just like with disability. My ability to play had just vanished when I wasn't able to hear myself. It was simple as that. But I was actually concerned with others perception, exactly like it has happened so many times when I'd have to do something in front of strangers that would make my physical disability even more obvious. And like with the concert audience, although everyone is able to tell I'm not moving as everybody else, people who know the real causes for that are really hard (usually restricted to my existing friends and doctors).
But as with real life, I didn't wanna just leave and let the rest of the band in the middle of the gig. So I stood there, trying sometimes to play louder, hoping that this would make me hear, and show everyone I wasn't a drunk, or a moron, or deaf. Again, just like I've always tried to do using my intellect to circumvent people wrong perceptions about myself. At some level I wanted to please them. And I wanted them to love me for that. To love despite the fact I'm disabled. To accept me just as I am. That would mean I've made it. It would mean disability didn't take away the best out of my life experience.
I felt a quick and enourmous relief when for some reason we've switched to a song I could sing instead of playing. I haven't thought about that up to that moment, but when you sing you can hear your voice through the vibration of your skull. All of a sudden, I wasn't disabled anymore. My old great ear would lead me to produce something beautiful and harmonic. My voice isn't itself that great, but with a flawless ear at least I can be sure I'm not ruining anyone's music experience with it.
Music magic was back for a brief moment. A really pretty girl with curly hair and black eyes just like mine came from the audience and we've started making a duo. Maybe it wasn't as fantastic as I felt at the moment. But looking deep into her black eyes, hearing her voice, seeing her lips move and being able to sing something that perfectly fit her voice and the rest of the band was the best thing that could have happened to me. Everything was in the proper place and disability was gone.
The whole experience was truly exhausting. Driving back home from the gig I've spoken a lot, as usual. But I can't remember what I talked about for more than half an hour. My mind was still on the stage. A voice would repeat, over and over, that I shouldn't have gone up the stage to play in those conditions. It was harshly condemning myself for exposing me in that utterly disabled way. But today it has just become clear that as well as with the physical part of my disability, not being disabled is not a choice for me. So writing this text I'm doing what I've learn is my best. I may not be able to make that choice that would definitely change my life in the most profound way. But I can make a sense of this non-choice and in doing so I can lead again. And feeling secure about being the lead and knowing where you're going is the exact opposite feeling of being disabled.
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