Grammar and Tones

For a teenage boy in Germany (and I guess many other parts in the world), there are really just two possible dream careers: football player and rock star. I was firmly in the latter camp. Then like today, and really like all my life, I’ve had an unreasonable aversion to anything that involves a ball, and I was always chosen last into the football team at school.

Music was different. After an initial attempt of playing the trumpet, which had been a purely opportunistic move of my parents because a friend had started giving affordable trumpet lessons, I changed to the guitar. I guess the fact that my deafening attempts at playing the C, which was the only note I ever learned on the trumpet, were so horrendous that the whole neighbourhood started complaining about the noise may have played a role in my parents’ decision to encourage me to try a different instrument.

So I picked up the guitar, acoustic at first. Guitar lessons were offered by the local church, and soon I joined the church band to play on Sundays during services and on Thursdays in the weekly teens club. Contrary to the other guys that took guitar lessons, I actually did practice occasionally, so I progressed somewhat quicker than the others and eventually got a bit of a reputation as a ‘good’ guitar player. Not an outstanding one for sure, but at least not too bad.

Tempting songs

The more I got into playing, the more I also got into listening to guitar music. Initially that was a lot of blues, which while typically played on electric guitars, carried over quite well to acoustic Western guitars. I soon found blues too straight-forward, and progressed into rock, which is really the same thing, but faster. Then, I got into hard rock. As I have written about before, hard rock and church don’t really go together well – the pastor was adamant that hard rock came straight from the devil to lead his sheep onto the wrong path, and with classic songs like Hells Bells by AC/DC, it’s easy to see why. I got an electric guitar, the biggest amplifier I could afford, grew long hair and a beard and a nice black leather jacket, and set out on a mission to precisely determine the maximum volume that I could play hellish songs in the basement of the church before the pastor would dash down and pull the plugs. Eventually, even hard rock became boring and I found much pleasure in listening and playing death metal. Some of the more melodic songs by bands like In Flames or Opeth are quite heavily inspired by classical music and technically quite challenging.

At some point I was playing the guitar pretty much every day, either in one of the various church services, or at the rehearsals for the same, or in my guitar lessons. It was a constant struggle to combine my passion for melodic death metal with my at the time equally strong passion for the Christian church. We did play quite a few of the more contemporary Christian songs which are largely inspired by pop music, and I would make it a habit to sneak in guitar solos from death metal or hard rock songs into the worship songs. This was generally quite well received – at least by the younger generation, maybe not so much by the older generation. Eventually, however, there’s a limit to how far you can go without raising eyebrows. Hence, I had to set up my own band.

Make some noise

It was an unlikely combination. As I said, all teenage boys want to become either football players or rock stars. So we got all the ones that wanted to become rock stars together and formed a band. It was Eric, Henning, Lars, my brother and myself.

Eric, like me, played the electric guitar, but unlike me, he wasn’t much into practising, so he mostly kept playing the three same chords of is favourite song in different variations – it would become a defining feature of our band that all our songs used the same three chords.

Henning was probably the best musician of all of us by far, but he played the bass, which is arguably the instrument where excellent skill has the least impact in a band. But at least we had one person who would just play what he was meant to play without messing it up.

Lars was the youngest one of us, and I think he was just happy that he was allowed to hang out with “the big boys”. He was a drummer, we needed drummer, he always played the same beat, and he too played it without messing it up.

Then there was my brother. My brother was into rap. And he was into song writing. His creativity far surpassed his skill, so every week he came to us with new song texts that where really deep in meaning, almost philosophical in nature, and would ask us to play something around it. We’d play the same three chords we always played, with the same rhythm we always used, and then he’d go ahead and rap his songs without paying any attention to the music and beat at all. Our songs always finished at different times.

Many years later, at my brothers wedding, I got our old band together once again, and since my brother was busy getting married, I had to take over his part and rap his song. I spent weeks to somehow make the lyrics match the rhythm and eventually I came up with a version that I thought was actually something you could almost call “music”. I played it at his wedding and watched my brother shake his head: “You rapped it all wrong”, he said, “the beat isn’t meant to be like this!”.

Finally, there was me. Henning, Eric, and Lars were into punk rock, my brother was into rap, and I really only cared about my heavy metal guitar solos. What came out of this was a medley of three chords being played in repetition, an endless philosophical treatise rapped without attention to those three chords or the rhythm, and a death metal guitar solo played without attention to any of the above. Needless to say that we didn’t make it very far. But it was our life, our passion, our childhood.

Good music never came out of our band. But friends for life. Lessons for life, too: The ability to compromise when different tastes of music clash. The commitment to turn up on time every week when your friends and bandmates were waiting for you. The communication skills to discuss how to match the different instruments and vocals together. The freedom to express yourself and find your own identity through music, clothing, hairstyle, ways of talking and behaving. The sensitivity around what type of music was acceptable in what sociocultural setting. The argumentative reasoning skills to debate if certain kinds of music were really as devilish as they appeared on the face of it. The negotiation skill to get access to a rehearsal room at times that worked for us, and crucially, volume levels that worked for us, as well as for the church. The self-confidence to perform in front of others, knowing that we made mistakes (and we made a lot of them). The ability to get into quite literally loud arguments (either verbally or instrumentally) and then make up again.

Music taught us many things, but not… well, music. It taught us life.

Level up

For Chinese teenagers, neither footballer nor musician are an option. Only the stupid kids that aren’t good enough at maths become football players. The Chinese national football team qualified for the World Cup only once in its history (in 2002) and lost every single match and did not score even a single goal. Not surprising, given the attitude towards sports that Chinese kids grow up with.

The attitude towards music and art that I – again from my very personal subjective experience – heard in China, was somewhat less harsh, but still devastating. Kids should do something useful. Not waste their time doing arts or music. But there is one exception to the rule – or rather two: the piano and the violin.

Piano and violin are the only “good” instruments in Chinese culture. This is interesting, because neither of them is actually a Chinese instrument, they are distinctively Western instruments and traditionally not found in Chinese music. But they have one advantage: you can rather precisely measure how good you are.

I did not know this, but apparently there is a whole series of piano exams that give you a precise grade that you’re at. Once you learnt all the songs of one grade you can take the exam, and progress to the next level. This way, parents can compare their children to other families children very easily and make sure that they are keeping up with the socially expected standard. Very convenient.

I guess, it also teaches kids something, but something very different to what music gave me: resilience, I suppose, to keep practising and making it to the next level; the ability to test well, which will be important in the later college entrance exam (which basically decides the whole fate of Chinese youngsters); the confidence to perform in front of a critical audience; the care not to ever make a mistake even under pressure; and probably many more things. Probably, these values are much more aligned with Chinese culture, than the values of self-expression and creativity encouraged in Western society.

My guitar teacher on the other hand said to me:

You can play as wrong as you want, as long as it rocks!

Bridging the gap

My wife picked the violin as a child, but later switched to the piano. She sometimes asks me which instrument I want our kids to learn. I normally respond something like

Whatever they think rocks!

I think that’s what music is there for. But I get her point, too. To be totally honest, the reason why our band sucked is that we didn’t put the effort in. Sure, we spent a lot of time playing together. But it was mostly for fun. Sure, I took some guitar lessons. But it wasn’t a lot. If I (or we) had had the focus and determination to “progress through the grades”, maybe our band would have come much further.

I don’t think it has to be the piano or the violin, I think any instrument can be used to achieve a level of mastery. Well, maybe not the chimes or glockenspiel… although Mike Oldfield brought it to world fame with a song that prominently featured Tubular Bells.

I will probably let our kids try out any instrument they like and encourage them to learn it well, and to find friends to play it with well. And by that time, I’ll probably pick up the guitar again to show them that their dad, too, both has determination to practise, and rocks!