Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
(Harmonica music)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
This is where my musical journey started,
with my harmonica when I was 15 years old.
It's hard to put into words
what an enormous game-changer this was for me,
especially because I was such a painfully shy, awkward kid.
Not many friends,
terrified of speaking in front of a crowd -
a little better now -
but suddenly, I had a voice.
Through music, I could speak and people listened and that was new.
It's funny because up until then
I really had no clue I had any talent for music at all.
But what I did have
were a few simple but very important things
that helped open the door for me.
I had something I was intensely curious about,
I had a safe space - my bedroom, my record player -
where I could explore this new thing with no fear of judgment.
And, most importantly of all,
no one told me I couldn't do it.
That freedom was such a gift
because it opened a way for me
just to explore and see how much music I had inside of me.
Which was surprising, but -
really, it shouldn't be so surprising,
because, really, our connection to music, all of us,
is such a fundamental aspect of being human.
And this connection is universal.
Every culture on the planet - without exception -
has a musical tradition.
And we can trace this way back to prehistoric times.
The first known musical instruments were found in a cave in Germany,
just in 2009;
flutes made out of bone, dating back 40,000 years.
So, they reconstructed one of these flutes,
and it plays a pentatonic scale.
It's a variation on the major scale
that's still widely used in music all over the world today.
So, this was mind-blowing to me.
It's like, primitive people living in caves 40,000 years ago
were using a modern musical form
completely by instinct.
How is that possible? Where did that music come from?
Is it something instinctive that's hard-wired in our brains,
like language?
Well, oddly enough, we know from modern brain imaging
that a lot of the same systems in our brain that process language
also process music.
So, now I was seeing the way I learned music (inaudible)
as something with very ancient roots, and more than that,
as something very deeply rooted in the subconscious mind.
Well, I discovered this very cool scientific term I'd never heard before -
implicit learning.
It refers to how we learn very complex information,
casually, without any conscious effort.
So, here's the thing:
Everyone here has had a profound experience
with implicit learning,
because this is how we all learned our native language as toddlers.
I like to call the process, "Doing becoming what you know,"
because simply from a lot of doing and a lot of listening,
our brains observed and organized all the complex patterns in language
simply by doing it,
and with no conscious effort.
Now, this rang a bell for me for how I learned jazz improvisation
because I really did connect to it, like language.
I didn't do a formal study of it,
but again, I had those conditions:
I had, you know, my curiosity,
my safe space to explore
and again, no one told me I couldn't do it.
So, let me give you a little demonstration of what I am talking about.
(Music begins)
So, I was exploring this beautiful new language
that I love the sound of,
but I didn't understand at all.
But little by little, I started to hear
what to me, were words that were standing out.
Like: (Scat singing)
(Music continues)
Nice. Oh, there's another one:
(Singing)
(Music continues)
(Singing)
Now, of course, I'm leaving out all the hours and days
and weeks and months
of feeling around in the dark to find the notes in those words.
And not just the words
but also the little variations in how the words were pronounced.
So, for instance:
(Scat singing) do da du de - could be - do ra de du du du dadada.
And these little details are so important for what makes a language sound authentic.
So, little by little,
I'm adding more and more words to my vocabulary,
and I'm starting to make little sentences -
like now we can make these sounds:
(Scat singing)
So, I'm adding more of these words to my vocabulary,
and I'm starting to make phrases,
and longer phrases,
until finally ...
something like this started to happen:
(Music continues)
(Scat singing)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
Thank you.
So, not only was I connecting to it like language,
like my native language,
I was moving inside of it on a subconscious level.
But this shouldn't be surprising
when you consider how incredibly ancient the roots of music are
in the human brain.
And a very important part of those roots is the ability to compose music,
because composing and playing -
they evolved together.
Think about it,
those ancient cave people
were not playing the hits of the day on their bone flutes, right?
They were composing;
they were improvising and creating melodies.
So, this is what made me understand
that everybody who's learning music
should also experiment with composing.
I had people in my songwriting program
who didn't even play an instrument when they started out,
but who gave themselves the freedom to just explore,
and learned to play and compose at the same time,
which is a really natural, very organic combination
that really works together really beautifully,
and it's got roots in the distant past.
So, the other thing that I really love is how music is so deeply intertwined
in the daily lives of so many cultures around the world.
For instance, there are African cultures where there's not even a word for music.
It's just so deeply integrated into the environment all around them
that they don't need to put it into this separate box.
Of course, in Western culture,
we love putting things in little separate boxes -
it's just so tidy.
Like so often with music education,
we reduce music to technical terms
and theoretical structures,
and teach it, so very often, almost like it was math.
Well, strangely enough,
one of my absolute favorite quotes about music
comes from one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
This guy actually co-invented calculus,
along with Newton.
His name was Gottfried Leibniz -
great name -
and he said,
"Music is a mathematical exercise of the soul,
unaware that it's counting."
So, yes, music can be reduced to mathematical terms,
but it's only in that extraordinary,
mysterious place
where the subconscious does the counting for us,
without us knowing it,
that music becomes that magical thing
that affects all of us so deeply, on so many levels.
What I've learned on my musical journey
is that I could trust my ears and my instincts
to guide me to everything I ever needed to know
for every musical situation I've been in.
And so many amazing musicians I've known over the years -
with no formal music education,
following just this ancient instinct from our prehistoric ancestors -
have traveled to every part of the world of music
that it's possible to go.
Although, I should say there's one part of the music world
that us self-taught musicians are very often excluded from,
and that's classical music.
This is why I decided I would close my talk
by playing a classical piece on my harmonica:
the "Ave Maria," by Gounod/Bach.
And as if that wasn't reckless enough,
I decided I would also create my own backing and arrangement
for a cello quartet.
Something completely new for me.
Why?
Well, beyond my love of exploring new creative frontiers,
nobody said I couldn't do it.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
(Music begins)
(Music ends)
(Applause)
Thank you very much. Thanks so much.
(Applause)