Eight Minutes vs. Eight Weeks
If you don't know Randall Munroe, you should. He's a former NASA roboticist, physicist, and the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd (yes, that's the real name). He is possibly one of the world's foremost experts at taking ridiculous questions far too seriously.
Munroe has built an entire career around asking the kinds of questions most of us laugh out loud at—and then using actual physics, mathematics, and research to figure out the answer.
His What If? series is a wildly popular blog (600,000 readers a week - slightly larger than mine) where people submit absurd hypothetical questions, and Munroe attempts to answer them scientifically.
And when I say absurd, I mean absurd. REALLY ABSURD!
Munroe has investigated what would happen if you threw a baseball at 90 percent of the speed of light (bad news for the batter and the catcher), whether you could swallow an entire cloud (you can't), if everyone on Earth jumped at exactly the same time (I'll let you read for yourself about that one), and how long humanity might survive if the Sun suddenly went out (not long).
But that is just the beginning.
Ever wonder what would happen if we drained the oceans, or if the solar system were filled with soup out to Jupiter? If the answer is yes, you need therapy, but more than anything you need yourself some Randall Monroe. Just so you know, as far as soup for a universe, he observed that things "might be okay for some people for a few minutes." After that, things get considerably worse.
This is Munroe's particular kind of genius: ask an absurd question, apply serious science to it, and somewhere between the joke and the mathematics, discover something genuinely interesting about the world.
Ask an absurd question, and Randall Munroe will give you a very serious answer.
In his latest book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems,Munroe turns his attention among other things, to learning to play the piano.
But because this is Randall Munroe, he doesn't simply talk about practicing scales or learning chords. It's kind of funny to those of us who have suffered through class piano as he states, "Learning to play is easy enough; just raise a finger and press down on a key that has little resistance. Simple!"
As someone who survived class piano, I just wish I could tell him, "Oh Randall, if it were only that easy."
As he posits about learning a new instrument, he doesn't stop at playing the piano; he starts wondering about the piano itself.
A standard piano has 88 keys. Fine. But he finds it limiting.
Why not 150? Or 250? Why stop at sounds audible to humans?
That's where things get wonderfully Munroe.
He theorizes that we should start expanding the piano to accommodate more of the frequencies humans can't hear and start worrying about the frequencies dogs can hear, which of course would require more keys. Bring bats into the equation, and suddenly Munroe's theoretical piano has around 155 keys.
Which is both ridiculous and brilliant.
Because underneath the absurdity is a surprisingly profound question:
Who is the music for?
We assume it's for humans. But what if were wrong.
In his book, he considers how music would be different if we made it for whales and bats. While it stretches the bounds of the activity, it raises an interesting question (this is Scott's question and not Randall's):
What if the music were for no one?
Think about it as I channel my inner and inadequate Munroe.
I have spent my entire career as a music educator - the large portion of which I was preparing music for someone else. Not for me. Not for my students. But for others who are not in my charge or my professional responsibility
The concert.
The football game.
The marching contest.
The festival.
The adjudicator.
The parents.
The administrators.
The audience.
No matter where the venue or what the event, there was always a recipient to hear the music-making—someone else to hear what we (my students and I) had created. I know we are the recipient during rehearsals, but for the sake of Randall, let's follow the question through.
We rehearse because eventually somebody is going to hear us.
We fix the release because somebody will experience it.
We tune the chord because somebody might notice.
We spend twenty minutes fixing eight measures because someday those eight measures are going to leave the rehearsal room and become a performance.
And that's okay.
Performance is one of the things that makes music extraordinary.
However, I wonder if, somewhere along the way, we teach kids that music becomes valuable only when and if somebody else hears it.
So, allow me to continue my Randall Munroe-esque journey into absurdity by asking you this:
What if at your next performance, nobody came?
Seriously! (Pause here for a minute and think about the ramifications for you and your students.)
Imagine telling your ensemble on the first day of the concert cycle:
"We are going to spend the next eight weeks preparing this music. We are going to rehearse it. Study it. Tune it. Phrase it. Fight with it. Get frustrated with it. Fall in love with it. And eight weeks from now, we are going to walk onto the stage and perform it beautifully."
But....
Nobody will be there to hear it.
No parents.
No administrators.
No judges.
No recording.
No applause.
You will walk onto the stage, perform the concert beautifully, take your bows for an auditorium filled with empty chairs, and go home.
What would your students say?
How would they react?
Would the eight weeks still matter?
Would you and they still fixate on the wrong notes?
Would you and they still care about the quality of the crescendo?
Would you and they still spend fifteen minutes getting the clarinets to match the articulation in measure 47?
Be honest, just between you and me. Would YOU still record rehearsals and study scores? Would you become so frustrated at repeated mistakes and missed rehearsals? Would you spend as much time at work obsessing over literature and seeking out errata sheets if no one would ever hear the fruits of your labor?
If we're (I'm) being honest here. I probably wouldn't care to the level of detail I do now.
And here's the bigger question:
Even without an audience, would the music still have accomplished what you wanted it to?
We all know it would. Because, in the end...
The audience gets eight minutes. The students get eight weeks.
The audience hears the final product.
The students live through the process that created it.
They learn to listen.
They learn to adjust.
They learn that the person sitting beside them matters.
They learn that their individual contribution is incredibly important, while also discovering that the group matters more than they do.
They experience frustration.
Patience.
Failure.
Repetition.
Improvement.
Trust.
Responsibility.
And every once in a (very long) while, if we're lucky, they experience beauty.
Because some of the most important musical moments of the year happen when nobody is listening.
Tuesday. 10:17 in the morning. Third period. Nobody outside the room even knows it happened. But it happened.
That is one of the great privileges of teaching music.
Yes, the concert and contests matter. The audience matters. I will be the first to admit that.
But they aren't the reason we do what we do, or our students do what they do..
Because the audience ONLY gets eight minutes. AND EIGHT WEEKS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS AND WHERE MUSIC EDUCATION LIVES.
So maybe every once in a while we should channel our inner Randall Munroe's and...
Take away the audience.
Take away the judges.
Take away the trophies.
Take away the applause.
Take away everything except the kids, you, and the music.
Then ask one wonderfully absurd question:
If nobody were listening, would this still be worth doing?
That may be the most important lesson we learn from Randall is that the most important performance we ever give might be tomorrow, during 3rd period.