S01E16 Don't Just Play Notes, Make Music

Laura visits her sister's high school orchestra and hears her tell students: "Don't just play notes, make music." This simple phrase sparks a deeper reflection.

 Playing notes is technical and compliant, where we are executing flawlessly but feeling nothing. Making music requires presence, interpretation, and bringing your full self to what you're doing.

Laura invites listeners to notice where we’re just going through the motions and get curious about what it would look like to start making music instead, in work, relationships, and daily life.

Transcript

0:08

Hello everyone. Welcome back to a Life in Color. Today I am talking about an experience that I had this week when I stopped in to visit my sister at work. I don't know if I've mentioned this before. My sister is an orchestra director, at a local high school. So she spends her days running the orchestra program. She has four levels of orchestras. and she spends all of her time with high school students, teenagers, it's beautiful work, which she does, and she's very passionate about it. And I see her at concerts all the time, but I rarely get to see her teaching her classes. I don't get to see what it's like for her to engage with these kids on a day-to-day basis. So I had to drop something off to her during the day and I decided to stay a while and observe. we started out in her office. It was between classes and the kids were filtering in and I was sitting on the couch as they're walking by, several of them stopped in the office. luckily the couch is positioned so that I could have my back to the kids because I forgot the chaos that teenagers and high school kids bring to the world. And so there were multiple times when I couldn't keep a straight face and I was very grateful to not have to be looking at them. There was a kid that stopped in this is probably noon. The middle of the day. Okay. And this is the lower level orchestra. So these kids are not super experienced in what they're doing, but this kid was probably 15 or 16 years old, stopped in to say, I forgot my instrument today, but I called my mom and she's driving it over, but it won't be here until like 20 minutes into class. Us and my sister just, just looks at him like, you forgot your instrument all day long today, but you just remembered now. Okay. Like what can she do? And then there was another kid who was walking by and she called him into the office and said, Hey, today's the last day to pay for the field trip. I guess they're gonna go see a show. And I already talked to your mom and she said, you are definitely interested in going, but I haven't received payment yet. You need to call your mom and tell her to submit it today.'cause it's the last day. And he looked at her and said, there's a field trip. And apparently she's been bringing this up in class multiple times recently. They've talked about this upcoming show they're gonna go see and how everybody needs to have their permission slips and their fees completed. And this kid just completely oblivious. And then my favorite, there was a kid who came in a little bit panicked saying, Hey, there's a piano in the middle of the room where my chair normally goes. What do I do? And she said, she doesn't laugh at any of this. She's so used to this. I was the only one laughing. She just looked at him totally deadpan and said, I, I feel like you can solve this problem. And he was, he looked at her like, what are you talking about? I have no idea what to do The piano is where my chair goes. How do I solve it? And she was like, I just want you to give it a go. I have so much faith in you, you can solve this problem. So he left and he came back a couple minutes later and he was like, it's not just me. There's three of us. That piano is in the way for three of us. do we, should we move the piano? Is that what's happening? She was like, no, please don't move the piano. Just give it a little more thought. And remember, when we play concerts, there's a piano on stage with us, and we have to move around the piano and sit with the piano, but maybe in a different spot. So just give it a shot. And he was legit confused as if this was just an unsolvable problem. And so I'm giggling just watching her and she's, she's just shaking her head. So we go out into class, everybody's there, they've got their instruments out, they're tuning and playing around with stuff. And she walks up onto the podium and, and I sat down in a chair right behind her so I could see the whole orchestra. And the first thing she says is she calls out that kid and she was like, I'm so glad that you were able to find a solution to sitting around the piano, but you did it wrong. That's not where you should sit. You have to move because I guess, I think you played violin. So the whole section of violin. Was on one side of the piano and he had put his little chair on the other side by himself and she was like, no, just move over here. I almost lost it. Anyway, while I was watching her with her orchestra, they tune and they get out the right song and they start playing and she is. Doing her thing right? Telling different instruments, Hey, violence, play a little softer there. Make sure you're keeping up with the tempo. Violas basses, this is where you shine. Make sure that you are listening to each other and whatever. She's a cello player, so I always think she secretly favors the cellos. And at one point she looks over at the cellos who are focusing very hard. They're concentrating very hard, and I think it's a fairly new piece that they're playing. And she says to them. Remember, don't just play notes, make music. And it stopped me in my tracks a little bit because I don't think she's just talking about music. Don't play notes, make music. She said it over and over again and they understood because I watched the transformation in how they were playing and the concentration on their faces and the way they were moving their bodies, even after she said that a couple of times, and I really started thinking about that phrase. If you've ever played an instrument, you know exactly what she meant. Playing notes is very technical. there's a correct way to do it. It's compliant. What is written on the page is very clear about what you're supposed to do, and you read the page, you hit the rhythm, you follow the tempo, you don't make mistakes. That's the goal. And if you go through and you do all of that and everybody in the orchestra also does all of that, it sounds fine. It sounds like someone is doing exactly what they were told, but making music that's different. Making music is when you understand the phrase, not just the notes. The notes work together. They build on each other, and there's often a peak, like they'll build up to a peak and you need to crescendo to get to that peak, and then you need to get quieter to let somebody else shine. You need to follow that music and feel the shape of the melody in your body, not just your fingers. When you listen, not just to yourself, but to the person next to you and the person across the room, and the silence between the sounds, that is when the music happens. Making music requires presence and interpretation, You have to be fully aware of what everybody else is doing and what the conductor is telling you to do and what's on the page. It requires you to bring yourself. Into the sound, not just your technical ability, you have to play from a part in the center of you, not just from your brain. That is how music happens. That is the difference between listening to a beginner band, play a song and a professional band play a song. They can play the exact same song. Even one musician think about. One beginner elementary school student playing a small piece of music. And if you give that same piece of music, that same piece of paper, the exact same notes, all of it to a professional musician, are they gonna sound the same? No. And it's not just because they'll have a better tone because they're stronger when they're a professional musician. That's not it. That's not all of it. They're making music. They know how to feel the music. And here's the thing about beginners. When I think about beginner students, or even, even, okay, in an orchestra, when you have a brand new piece of music, they handed out the first day and you've never played it before. No matter how good you are, you're immediately focused on the notes. You have to learn the notes when you're a beginner for an instrument. You can play the notes almost immediately. That's the first thing you learn, and you can be technically correct within weeks, but making music takes longer, a lot longer. It's not a skill that you can drill into people. It's a kind of embodiment, and everybody in that orchestra has to be willing to stop just performing the instruments and start feeling the thing that you're all creating together, that you're co-creating. I come from musicians. I play the flute and the piano, and I sing a bit. My sister obviously plays the cello and she is an orchestra director. Her husband's in the Navy band. He plays euphonium. My parents met in their. College choir. My dad plays piano. My mom plays guitar. We are musicians through and through even our extended family. I grew up with this knowledge of what it is to make music and what good music sounds like. I don't just mean good in terms of I like this song and I don't like that song. I mean, what it feels like to listen to a piece of music that is played to make music and not just a song that somebody is playing the notes I grew up with this. I understand at a cellular level what it feels like to make music and the creativity that that activates and the community that, that activates. But I also spent 20 years in corporate leadership, and I can tell you what I learned from that. I was very good, very, very good at playing the notes at work. Execution delivery. I could follow the score exactly. I hit every metric. I never missed a beat. And I also felt like I was dying on the inside because no one, no one ever asks each other to make music in that environment. No one asked me to interpret or bring my full self or feel what I was doing and let that inform how I did it. So even when I did those things, the system didn't know what to do with it. That's not what's expected when you're at work. And this doesn't just apply to the office. By the way. This also applies to parenting, to relationships, to creativity. When you're making art to your leadership style, to your own internal life. When I was at work, they wanted the notes. Clean, correct. Compliant. And I gave them that every time. And I couldn't do it anymore. I just couldn't do it. And here's where I get curious. I. Because I look around at the world that we've built, and I see so many people playing notes. Careers where you're technically excellent, but you're spiritually absent. Relationships, that function, but they don't resonate. There's not that extra energy that's created. Between the people in the relationship because they're going day to day through the motions, just playing the notes. Days that are efficient but at the end of the day, they feel hollow. There was no meaning. We've built systems that reward execution, correctness, compliance, output, and we've convinced ourselves that if we just play the notes well enough, eventually it'll feel like music. Or it'll sound like music, but it doesn't work that way. You can't execute your way into aliveness. And isn't that the goal? You can't be so precise, so efficient, so technically flawless that meaning just magically appears. You can't write the meaning onto the page. The meaning comes from within us, our humanity and the magic that happens. Between us as a group, because making music in any area of life requires something that we have been suppressing. And that is interpretation, expression, presence, feeling. It requires you to stop performing someone else's idea of correctness and start bringing yourself fully into what you're doing. And that feels terrifying in the moment. When you are considering opening yourself up like that, showing vulnerability like that, it's terrifying. So I play the flute. There were multiple times when I was part of an ensemble where I had to play a solo. And what that means is there's a whole group of flutes. We're all playing similar music. Sometimes there's multiple parts and there's harmonies and whatever, but sometimes the first chair flute or the first and second chair flute have to play a solo where you're the only flute playing. Sometimes you're the only instrument playing and it is terrifying. Not everybody feels that way. There are a lot of musicians that are very happy to be center stage. For me it felt so vulnerable because I'm about to open myself up to criticism, everybody's eyes are gonna be on me, everybody will know whether or not I practiced. cause when you make music, you can be wrong. There's a right way to do it and a very wrong way to do it. And you can be misunderstood. You can try something and have it not land. That happens in life too. But when you're just playing the notes, you're safe. As long as you've learned the notes. If you play them correctly, you are beyond criticism, right? So we keep playing the notes because it's safe and it's not terrifying. In our work, in our relationships, in the way that we move through our days, we hit the beats, we follow the tempo. We try not to make mistakes, and then we wonder why it feels like something is missing. So let's talk about the orchestra for a minute, because I think that there's something here that applies to all of us, whether or not you've ever held an instrument, whether or not you've ever been part of an orchestral ensemble. An orchestra is not just a collection of people playing something correctly. If that's all it was, you could program a computer to do it. And honestly, it would probably be more precise. It's very difficult to be perfectly precise as a human. I remember when I first met my husband, he's not a musician, he was an athlete, and so when I would talk about particularly difficult pieces that we've played in the past and how challenging it is to get the whole group to play it correctly, he asked me at one point, why is that? Don't, you just learn the notes and once you have it in your fingers, you just play it like that every time. And I was a little bit at a loss for words because it was so wrong, but I couldn't explain why in the moment that wouldn't be true. It does seem like that should be true. that you could just learn the notes and then you can play the piece and then you're done. What I will say is, as a group of humans, it is almost impossible to be perfectly precise when playing a piece of music. Everybody has such a dynamic ask in that system because it is a living system. It requires individual mastery and collective resonance. And what I mean when I say collective resonance is you have to know your part. Yes. But you have to be more than just technically solid. You have to listen. You have to respond to each other. You have to know when to lead and when to support, when to fill space and when to leave silence. And you have to trust that the person next to you is doing the same thing. when it works, when everybody's making music. And not just playing notes, There are moments when something just clicks into place and the song, the piece of music takes on a life of its own, the energy changes in the room. And as a musician, when that happens, you feel it. I know you're in it and you're focusing on your part and the system. But there were countless times when I was playing that I would get goosebumps involuntarily. The feel of the room changed. It was like a separate, if you're familiar with the concept of tritones, when you play two notes, sometimes in a specific interval, two notes together, we'll make a third sound. You're only playing two notes, but there's a third sound that comes out of it. It was kind of like that the orchestra or the musical ensemble would be playing a piece of music and there was another energy stream that was created by the, all of those notes. It was like another, another source of energy that opened up and you feel it physically in the room. Something happens that can't be explained by the sum of the parts. The sound becomes felt and it moves through your body, it lands in your chest. It creates something that wasn't there before. And that's what we're talking about when we say make music not perfection. It's never perfect. There's always something that can be improved. So it's not perfection that's doing that. It's the presence of everybody in the group working together to make something bigger than the sum of its parts. I wanna touch on silence for just a minute because one of the things that beginners struggle with the most in music is silence. The rests on the page, the space between the sounds, silence feels like doing nothing. It feels exposed. It feels like something vulnerable, and people rush through it. They rush to fill in the silence, but that's where the music breathes, those silences are written in there on purpose, this is one of the reasons that our lives feel so noisy. We have lost the tolerance for silence, for pauses, for space where nothing is being produced. Music is a universal language. It bypasses logic. It doesn't need translation. You can play a piece of music to anyone around the world. They immediately understand what they're listening to or how it feels, or that it's music. It moves through your nervous system before your brain even understands what's happening. It impacts your nervous system and it regulates you. It can soothe you. It can energize you. It connects people across language, culture, age, experience. There is nowhere in the world. There is not a single culture that doesn't have music. And you don't have to understand music to be moved by it. You don't have to be a musician or have any technical expertise to be moved by a piece of music. You just have to be present with it. And I wonder genuinely why we don't try to build other systems that work the way music does. Why is music an outlier? It's like stands alone as the only thing that has those qualities. Why are there not more systems that prioritize collective resonance over productivity or connection between people over correctness and perfection? Why aren't we prioritizing presence over performance? If people are present and they're paying attention and they're putting themselves into something, surely that's gotta be better and more powerful than people performing something they don't really feel. And I'm not saying that we should abandon structure or skill or discipline. You need all of those things. The orchestra needs all of those things, right? But what if we stopped stopping there, we stop there. With just the notes. What if that wasn't the end goal? What if we pushed beyond that and we treated those things as the foundation? those are the techniques that allow you to make music, but it's not the music itself. I just wonder why we don't build systems that work this way, and I don't have an answer here. I'm genuinely wondering why have we accepted execution? Without any kind of expression as the norm, and I don't understand why we reserve making music for art and hobbies and things that we do in the margins of our lives. And then we spend the rest of our time just playing notes. And I start to imagine what it would look like if we brought that same presence and embodiment and willingness to feel to what we're doing in our work, in our relationships, the way we lead people in our everyday existence. What would change if we stopped asking, am I doing this correctly? Am I applying the right technique? Am I hitting everywhere I'm supposed to be hitting so that people are gonna be happy with my performance and started instead asking. Am I making music? How does this feel? How do I feel about this? And how am I making other people feel about this? And what's the person next to me doing? What's the person across the room doing and how can we work together to make this more resonant, to make it better? So here's the invitation for this episode. If you want it, take a look at your days and see if you can notice where you're just playing the notes. There's no shame in it. It's not your fault, and I don't think we can fix it immediately. I'm not asking you to fix it when you notice it, just notice it. Take note of when you are just going through the motions. You are just playing the notes. You are technically correct, but spiritually absent. Are there places where you are executing flawlessly, flawlessly? Maybe you're amazing at your job, but you feel nothing And then I want you to get curious about where you might be able to inject some music and what would it look like if you were making music instead, if the people around you were making music instead, what would that look like? Because expression doesn't make you extra. It's not something that you do on top of a well executed life. It's not like the extra cherry on top of everything. It's optional. It's essential. It's what makes the sound become felt. It's what turns existence into aliveness. I don't want us to just keep playing the notes. I think we're capable of so much more, and I wanna build a world where we're making music. All right. I'm gonna get off my soapbox. We'll wrap for today there. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a Life and Color. As always, my email is Laura, L-A-U-R-A at a life and color.co. I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear from you about what you're noticing in your life. Where are you just playing the notes? Where can you start making music? What are your thoughts on all of that? Where does it feel vulnerable and terrifying? I read them all. I love to receive your emails. And I would also invite you to visit us at a life in color.co where you can find lots more information just like this. This is the work that we do at a life in color. I hope you have the best rest of your day for any of you that are impacted by this snowstorm. I hope that you are staying warm and cozy and safe, and I'll talk to you next week. Thanks everyone.