Music Notes by Brian Plaugher, Director of Music Ministries
All Cows Eat Grass. Good Boys Do Fine Always. When I was in 4th grade and learning to play the trombone, these were the mnemonic devices for notes on the spaces (a, c, e, g) and lines (g, b, d, f, a) of the bass clef. The notes have become second nature to me now, even when the extra ledger lines place them beyond the staff. Since then I have learned to read in four clefs (though my tenor and alto clef reading are a little, ahem, rusty). I have read and performed music with various instruments and vocally and even composed pieces for worship.
Yet all this writing and reading of musical notation is not the way to learn music in most of the world, for most of history and today. This was brought home to me on our church’s recent Mission Trip to Nicaragua. Our delegation helped to build a school at a tiny hamlet in the country under the auspices of the organization Seeds of Learning (SOL). Our lodging was at the SOL learning center in Ciudad Dario, a small city nearby. The learning center featured activities for students, homework help, a library, and many classes. Several afternoons after our construction activities we heard rehearsals of Grupo Sol in the courtyard. There are more than a dozen members of this ensemble. They sing, and play various traditional instruments: guitar, marimba, various percussion, the big six-string bass you see in mariachi bands that looks like an oversized guitar, and the undersized mandolin.
Grupo Sol performed for us on the evening of our arrival, and as I said I heard several rehearsals, but as far as I could tell they learned and performed all of their tunes without any sheet music. They learned by listening, and memorizing the compositions.
Most musical rehearsals involve some repetition. At home, we go over things, and if there is a difficult passage we may go over it a lot. No number of repetitions in the rehearsals I am accustomed to can match the sheer volume of that group in Nicaragua. After hearing a marimba part what seemed like a hundred times one afternoon, I walked over to the two young teenaged girls and asked to play along. One of the pair was struck by incurable shyness, but the other was game to show me the ropes. What I discovered was just how difficult the rote method is for me. Even though I could sing the part in my head, I could only get through about two thirds of the passage before losing it. Imagine this: as I was having difficulties on the final bit, I tried visualizing what the notes would look like on paper to help me learn the rhythm.
This was a comedown to me. After all, I had sung Beethoven’s 9th under the baton of Robert Shaw, had studied with the principal trombone of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Heck, I was the Director of Music Ministries of the Community Church in Sebastopol. And yet all of that experience, that was so centered on reading and recreating musical texts, was not sufficient for me to learn a small marimba part in the most common way: by rote.
I am not talking about improvising, by the way. I can improvise in multiple styles and on various instruments. No, this is something else: a song that is performed in a specific way, but the way it is passed on is not through paper notation, but by hearing and doing.
I was humbled. Nicaragua is very poor, the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere, and I had arrived there feeling very rich, in terms not just of money but also in education and experience. Yet my stab at the marimba revealed my poverty in learning music the most common way, by ear. I appreciated anew the intelligence and skill needed to pass on and perform music by these traditional means. Sometimes the modern way, the technological way, the complicated gringo way is not the richest or the most powerful or the best after all. Sometimes, in God’s topsy turvy world, the poor and downtrodden are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and the musically illiterate can really wail on the marimba.
