The Expensive Guitar Ensemble

I started writing a piece a while ago about music theory but never ended up finishing it because I couldn’t make a conclusive point. I was feeling frustrated that my music teachers in the past had focused so heavily on learning theory, causing my understanding of music to be unnecessarily technical and leaving me with an empty feeling when I sat down to practice. I learned rhythm, chord progression, phrasing, and composition – but I felt as though I never developed my emotional understanding of music, or maybe I never let myself express it because I was too focused on “getting it”.

It occurred to me recently that we live in a very scientific society. Combined with the high importance we place on being consumers, we have managed to take a soulful emotional thing like music and turn it into a concrete item the individual can purchase, process, and add to the list of things s/he has accomplished. This thought hit me on the first day of my beginning guitar class when I looked around and noticed a few of my fellow classmates holding guitars that must have cost them several hundred dollars a piece. I wondered: is a scraggly D-chord really going to sound that much better on an expensive guitar? Are we really music lovers or just music consumers?

There is an odd rewiring that has happened in our brains – and I will admit I have been guilty of it too – when our creative motivation becomes a competition. Among high school students, it is a competition to fill one’s free time with activities, leadership roles, and other things to beef up a college application. For young adults, the situation is similar in the increasingly competitive market for jobs – the key is to make one’s self look interesting on paper in order to get an interview. In a strange turn of events, the true heart and soul of the individual is now concentrated into a short list of “extracurricular interests” at the bottom of one’s resume.

While the technical aspects of any creative discipline cannot be ignored, we should move away from equating these with full “understanding”. The intangible aspects of music and art are among the few things that remain un-consumable and keep us in our place.