No one is "unmusical"
I love music. I love to play. I love to write it. I love to listen to it. I love to teach it. In all my years in music - more than 40 now - I have yet to meet someone who is truly "unmusical." Now, I have met people who aren't interested in music; people who haven't had the opportunity to study music or have been told they are "unmusical," but I have never met someone who truly was "unmusical." When I say "unmusical" I mean someone who has no inherent sense of pitch or rhythm. I don't know how someone could exist and function in society thus afflicted.
You may have heard the adage attributed to Zimbabwean lore:
"If you can talk you can sing.
If you can walk you can dance."
Well, Zimbabwean or not, there is a fundamental truth in that. There is pitch and rhythm is our everyday speech. We could not communicate without pitch and rhythm. How would you know if some was asking you a question if you couldn't hear the rise in pitch at the end of the phrase? How could you pronounce a multi-syllable word without a sense of rhythm. You and everyone talking to you would sound like those droning robots in 1960s scifi films.
I've never met a natural robo-talker. I do hear people using "sing-song" speech when they talk to small children and pets, or in more emphatic form while cursing a driver that has just cut them off. Some of those people then turn around and tell me that they are "tone deaf" or "can't carry a tune."
Of course, people don't recognise this as musicality. When they say they are "unmusical" or its sidekick "untalented," they mean they believe they can't sing or play an instrument usually after having been told so by some jerk - usually a family member or so-called teacher.
Now, I am not saying everyone can sing like k.d. Lang or Ben Heppner, or play piano like Oscar Peterson or Glenn Gould. Not everyone has the opportunity to put in their 10,000 hours to become an elite performer. But, those musicians are, or were, at the top level of professional performance. There are a myriad of other performance levels.
The performers I have mentioned have benefitted from opportunity, positive feedback and support, direction either formally or informally from a teacher or mentor and the discipline needed to put in untold hours of practice to achieve an elite level. But the elite level is not the only level of satisfactory musical competence.
John Powell, in his book "How Music Works," points out that people don't consider themselves "unpotterly" if they can't make a clay pot, or "unknitty" if they can't knit. They recognise that throwing a clay pot or knitting a curling sweater are simply skills they haven't acquired: but could if they really wanted to.
When it comes to music, as with the other "fine arts," we are still hostage to 19th century Romantic notions of innate talent and genius. But, that my friend is a topic for another posting...
You may have heard the adage attributed to Zimbabwean lore:
"If you can talk you can sing.
If you can walk you can dance."
Well, Zimbabwean or not, there is a fundamental truth in that. There is pitch and rhythm is our everyday speech. We could not communicate without pitch and rhythm. How would you know if some was asking you a question if you couldn't hear the rise in pitch at the end of the phrase? How could you pronounce a multi-syllable word without a sense of rhythm. You and everyone talking to you would sound like those droning robots in 1960s scifi films.
I've never met a natural robo-talker. I do hear people using "sing-song" speech when they talk to small children and pets, or in more emphatic form while cursing a driver that has just cut them off. Some of those people then turn around and tell me that they are "tone deaf" or "can't carry a tune."
Of course, people don't recognise this as musicality. When they say they are "unmusical" or its sidekick "untalented," they mean they believe they can't sing or play an instrument usually after having been told so by some jerk - usually a family member or so-called teacher.
Now, I am not saying everyone can sing like k.d. Lang or Ben Heppner, or play piano like Oscar Peterson or Glenn Gould. Not everyone has the opportunity to put in their 10,000 hours to become an elite performer. But, those musicians are, or were, at the top level of professional performance. There are a myriad of other performance levels.
The performers I have mentioned have benefitted from opportunity, positive feedback and support, direction either formally or informally from a teacher or mentor and the discipline needed to put in untold hours of practice to achieve an elite level. But the elite level is not the only level of satisfactory musical competence.
John Powell, in his book "How Music Works," points out that people don't consider themselves "unpotterly" if they can't make a clay pot, or "unknitty" if they can't knit. They recognise that throwing a clay pot or knitting a curling sweater are simply skills they haven't acquired: but could if they really wanted to.
When it comes to music, as with the other "fine arts," we are still hostage to 19th century Romantic notions of innate talent and genius. But, that my friend is a topic for another posting...
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