So, about that whole "learning" thing, Seamus...

Okay, okay. So it’s not completely impossible to make neat, convenient analogies that involve music and musicians. Put the pitchforks and torches away for a just a sec.

Ever tried to learn a new language? If you have, you’ve probably heard that fluency means being able to not only speak in your new language, but think in it too. When you can think in a language, you can form thoughts it directly, and then turn those thoughts directly into words – with none of the pesky pauses for conjugation and declension that native speakers never need. Well, by the same token, you can think of a musician as someone who has learned to speak fluent tunes: someone whose thoughts come to them in notes, which can be turned more or less straightaway into melody, sans stopping to reach for a calculator to figure out what meter their in. 

Notes, chords, and melody are the musician’s words, thoughts, and sentences. He puts together a song or a symphony in much the same way I write a paragraph in English: by building patterns out of bytes, structures out of patterns, concepts out of structures, etc., all according to internalized rules. Depending on how much formal training he’s had, a musician may or may not understand those rules, may or may not consciously manipulate them, and may or may not even be aware of them. Fortunately you don’t need to know how to diagram sentences in order to write taught English, any more than you need to be able to recognize a semiquaver to play one. The musician simply thinks in melody, without having to mentally translate thoughts, emotions, and concepts into tunes note by note.

Caveat, though: it’s nowhere near as simple as I’ve tried to make it sound… just like writing this post is hardly as simply as stringing together a few nouns and verbs and calling it a night. My own cozy analogy comes up short pretty quickly. Music is a natural voice to those who use it, just like language is; but it is also acquired, like language… and all the complexity, all the oddity, all the quixotic what-the-fuckness, that all gets mixed in during the process of acquisition. I don’t speak or think in English, after all: I’m fluent in American vernacular, with a “woaaaaah”-addled vocabulary from Southern California, leftover strands of a Texan accent, and the occasional “r”-omitting affectations of someone who’s bought too much coffee at Dunkin Donuts. And by the same token, any musician who ever learned jazz, classical, Tuvan throat-singing, or the Egyptian oud, found their new voice in a particular set of personal, cultural, and geographic circumstances – and that’s where the fun really starts.

See, those circumstances stand a decent chances of being just as mixed up, tangled, and paradoxical as the ones that gave me the habit of saying, “Dude, I’m fixin’ to get me some fish tacos.” And chances are equally good – as anyone who’s ever asked for a “ride home” in Ireland can attest – the outcome will be equal parts terrifying, hilarious, and fascinating.

But I’ll tackle them next time… or maybe the time after that. In the mean time, if anyone else knows a doppelganger of mine who learned nyckelharpa in Vietnam, tell him to give me a call. I lost his number.