The most important thing you can do is fail
I had an arts residency last week, helping the kids at a Waldorf school with the crankies they had been working on for a couple of days prior. (Crankies, for the uninitiated, are illustrated scrolls that are cranked from one dowel to another in a wooden box. Comme ça. I believe some folks know them as “TV in a box” and way back in the (19th c.) day they were known as ‘moving panoramas’. I digress.) Usually, I’m brought into a school to present a self-contained program: I do a performance and then walk the class through conceptualizing and laying out the piece, often with a story or song already chosen. This particular residency was more free-form, and the teacher asked me to move from student to student, looking at what they had started on and suggesting ways to improve the piece. I tried to give feedback with a mix of affirmation and constructive direction, but one of the students was upset when suggested some changes to her layout, taking that to mean that her work wasn’t any good. The teacher wanted me to give a bit of a pep talk, assuring everybody that everything they were doing was great. Instead, I’m afraid, I told them that the best thing you can do is to allow yourself to not be good at something the first time you try it. And the second. Again: the best thing that can happen to you when you’re learning something new is to not be good at it. Most of the great artists you can think of started out as not-great artists. (Okay, there are exceptions. But for every Mozart of a child prodigy, there’s a Van Gogh, whose early pieces weren’t all that great. In all probability, the ratio of Van Goghs to Mozarts is quite high).
I think failing is the most important thing you can do as an artist. Your early work should be bad. I love the stage of being bad at things—two summers ago, I spent a week in France doing an informal language immersion with a family in the Auvergne. I sound like an idiot in French, and I love the freedom of that (though sometimes I also want to hang a sign from my neck that says, “Je suis plus intelligent qu’il n’y paraît.”)
It is, of course, easier to give somebody else advice about accepting failure than it is to accept your own, so I thought I would revisit this essay I wrote ten years ago about my failure to play the fiddle. I have never wanted anything as much, nor worked at anything as diligently, but it turns out that those are not sufficient. I will say that in the time since I wrote this piece, I have continued to play and I still love it deeply. The game changer was deciding to let go of performing on fiddle and to only play socially, with friends and at festivals. Much, much better for my mental health.
This essay (about 9,000 words, so give yourself a moment) is from “A Word From The Field”, a collection of personal essays I published about ten years ago. Thanks for reading.
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Failing
As a full-time musician, most of what I have done with my life is practice. There has also been performing, social music-making, recording, teaching, touring, all these things. But all these are only possible because of the time spent practicing, time that boils down to being alone in a room with your body and your mind and an instrument, trying to get your fingers to make the sounds you hear in your head. In his book, Practicing, Glenn Kurtz describes practicing as “a story you tell yourself, [...] the story that leads you on.” He expands:
Practicing is the fundamental story. Whether as a musician, as an athlete, at your job, or in love, practice gives direction to your longing, gives substance to your labor. Every day you go to the gym or sit down at your desk. The work is not always interesting, not always fun. Sometimes it is tedious. Sometimes it is infuriating. Why do you continue? Why did you start in the first place? You must have an answer that helps you persevere [...] Without telling yourself some story of practicing, without imagining a path to your goal, the aggravation and effort seem pointless.
The story is fundamental. As a multi-instrumentalist, I tell myself different stories for the different instruments that I play. On the fiddle, the instrument I have played the longest and which I long to play the best, the story I tell myself is that I have failed. I have not lived up to my own expectations. I feel discouraged and trapped, sawing away in my room because I’m reluctant to play in public, trying to recapture through flawed means—which is to say the same patterns that got me here—the joy I once felt. The physical experience of playing the instrument involves effort and tension. On the mbira, the Zimbabwean thumb piano I have been playing for the past eight years, the story I tell myself is one of exploration. Because I have never imagined that anyone would pay money to see a white kid from Minnesota playing African music, my motivation for playing the mbira always been only that I love the sound of it. I love how that sound makes me feel. I have enjoyed the sheer challenge and foreignness of it. The physical experience of playing the instrument makes me feel grounded and balanced.
These are very different stories and yet I am the same person, the same body holding two disparate narratives. I am pursuing the same basic premises of music on each instrument: expressing the ineffable, knowing myself more deeply, connecting with others. I wonder myself why the two stories are so different.
I started playing the fiddle when I was 20. I was working at a community farm in Vermont and my friend Alex took me to a contra dance in Bristol, a little town in the mountains just down from Middlebury Gap. The dance was in a hall on the town green on a winter’s night, with all the charm of snow on the mountains and the warm light in the windows inviting us in where about 80 people were dancing and socializing. The dancing was a lot of fun, but what grabbed me most that night was the music. The band was a duo on fiddle and guitar and they were playing the Irish tunes I hadn’t heard since I was a child. Hearing those forgotten melodies again, I decided that I wanted to be that guy playing the fiddle. I wanted to sit in that chair and play the tunes that made people dance. To my good fortune, I had taken violin lessons for a few years when I was young, from 10 until 13, and though I had never been very good, my mother had purchased a full-size instrument. I quit not too long after that, which must have been a sizeable frustration to her, but meant that there was still a fiddle in the closet of my boyhood room. The next time I was home, just before my mother sold the house we had grown up in and moved to South Dakota, I grabbed that fiddle out of the closet and took it back to Vermont with me, where I started in on playing with immense devotion if not, at least at first, with any great musicality.
There is more to the story. It starts with my dad, Liam, who emigrated to the States from Ireland when he was twenty one. One of five children, he grew up in Dun Laoghaire, a then-small town just south of Dublin. As a youngster in Ireland, he had been more interested in Bill Haley and the Comets than the traditional music at the Piper’s Club, but when he found himself an immigrant in a new land he became more Irish than he had ever been. Like so many other immigrants cut off from family and roots, he fought hard to maintain his identity. And so, in addition to the green car and the green sofa, he listened to Irish music: The Chieftains mostly, but anything else he could get his hands on at The Electric Fetus, the record store at 4th and Franklin we would go to on Saturday afternoons. When I say that we listened to a lot of Irish music, you should understand that we weren’t allowed to listen to anything else except Mozart and Pete Seeger, the two musicians that completed his personal, peculiar triumvirate.
My father was killed when I was eleven. He was murdered, shot twice in the head while he was in the bathtub by his roommate, a man named Tom we had all known for years. A year or so before that, Tom, my dad, and another friend named Dean bought a duplex together. Dean lived on the bottom floor with his new wife and her daughter, and my dad shared the top floor with Tom. In that same year, Tom had become increasingly alcoholic, possibly in response to testicular cancer. Living with an alcoholic wasn’t working for Dean or my dad, so they had told Tom that they wanted to sell the house and find their own places. With no other friends or family, Tom felt betrayed and abandoned. So he bought a .22 caliber pistol, killed my father, went downstairs and shot Dean from across the room, and then went back to his bedroom and shot himself in the head. Dean survived after 11 days in the ICU, though I did not see him again for many years.
The full story of the aftermath of that day and its impact on my life deserves its own essay, one I might yet write but not quite now. And while this piece is not explicitly about the trauma of losing my dad as a boy, that story and playing the fiddle are, for me, inextricably linked. I know that he would have loved that I play Irish music, and that in doing so I am both seeking his approval and maintaining a connection to him. I also know that this connection ups the stakes of my playing and is a strong piece of why I am so impatient with my shortcomings. But all of that would not happen for ten years or more after he was killed. In the immediate wake of the murder, among other, innumerable, things lost, I didn’t hear Irish music for many years. My mother wasn’t invested in the same music: it strikes me now that hearing it would have reminded her of my father, of their complicated relationship, and of the trauma of his death. Hearing that fiddler in Bristol playing those old tunes was like coming home.
My relationship with the mbira, like so many other good things in my life, started off by pure chance. I had a job that year as a long-term music sub at a local elementary school that had decided to host an arts festival that focused on African traditions. One of the performers at the festival was a local storyteller who invited me to be a part of one of his tales, a version of The Tortoise and The Hare where all I needed to do was play an instrument, any instrument, better than he did. Eshu stressed that it truly could be anything—Bach chaconnes or Scott Joplin or what have you—but I wanted to stay in the theme and worked up some guitar pieces in the style of Jean Bosco Mwenda, a Zairean star from the 1950s. When Eshu heard me warming up, he asked if he could take lessons. That was fine with me, but I thought to myself that a professional storyteller must make even less money than a substitute teacher, so I wasn’t sure how I would ask him for money. And then he took out an mbira that he was using in another story and played the opening lines of Nhemamusasa, one of the staples of the Shona repertoire. I fell in love with the sound and we arranged to do a swap.
Played by the Shona people of Zimbabwe, the mbira is an ancient instrument made of metal keys suspended over a wooden soundboard. You may think of the instrument as a thumb piano. This name is not beloved by the Shona people I know who see it as a relic of colonialism. In any event, the mbira is a much older instrument than the piano, which only dates to the early 1700’s. Archeological evidence from the Great Zimbabwe, a massive stone settlement outside of Masvingo, dates the mbira back to at least 500 CE, some 1500 years ago. There are many variants of the instrument throughout East Africa, and you can find them as far north as Rwanda and as far south as northern South Africa. The most prominent one in Zimbabwe, which is what I play, has 24 keys and is called mbira dza vadzimu, which translates as “the mbira of the ancestors.” The keys are plucked with the ends of the thumbs: the complexity of the music that is created by such a simple playing technique and such a simple construction is truly astonishing. The sound of the instrument is incredibly evocative, though I remain undecided whether it is the happiest sad sound I have ever heard or the saddest happy sound. The greater truth is that mbira music places you right on the knife’s edge between joy and sorrow, between abundance and loss. Something of that seems endemic to the structure of the music: traditional Shona pieces are circular, and a circle—properly conceived—contains an infinity of potential starting points; this music is polyrhythmic, and can be heard simultaneously in 2 or in 3; when you play the mbira, Shona people believe that it is not you playing but your ancestor (shave) spirits who are playing through you, so the music is also simultaneously of the past and of the present, of the spirit world and of our realm. In containing all of these, mbira music is like Taoism in its ability to hold contradictory points of view to be simultaneously true. Being both sad and happy, then, is the least of it.
As it turns out, if one is to get hooked on a relatively obscure sub-Saharan musical tradition while living in the U.S., then Zimbabwean mbira is the way to go. Shona mbira music been well studied by ethnomusicologists, so a number of universities have student ensembles and bring in Zimbabwean musicians as visiting artists. To my good fortune, Williams College—not far from where I live—is one of those. After Eshu had shown me the basic rudiments, I was able to have my first true lessons with Cosmas Magaya, one of the masters of the instrument. A big man and patient, Cosmas broke down my earliest pieces into digestible phrases and whetted my appetite for more. Since then I have been able to have lessons with a number of Shona musicians who were touring in the U.S.—Forward Kwenda, Patience Chaitezvi, Musekiwa Chingodza, and Fradreck Mujuru—as well as to play with other Westerners who have been entranced by this music.
When I saw Eshu play that first time, I thought I was discovering something completely new. But after I had been playing for a little while, I looked back and saw that there were breadcrumbs along the path that had been leading me here all along. Like these: when I was little, one of my dad’s favorite movies was The African Queen. When I watched that again last year, I was stunned to see that when Humphrey Bogart makes his entrance, coming along the river on that little boat of his, there were two Kenyans playing mbira on the bow. And when I was in college, one of my favorite albums was Pieces of Africa by The Kronos Quartet, featuring the mbira playing of Dumisani Maraire. At the time, I didn’t know what was making those sounds. Now I realize that I was just waiting for a doorway in, an entry finally provided by a chance encounter with a storyteller.
When I started playing the fiddle after that contra dance in Bristol, I was essentially starting from scratch. There had been those few years of lessons when I was ten, but I had been no musical prodigy. I was in the school orchestra briefly, but was mostly relegated to the practice room because I couldn’t keep up with the group. In spite of not having had any childhood success, I was undaunted. One of my greatest strengths, supported by early academic success in school and college, has always been the belief that I could figure out how to do just about anything given enough time and energy.
I certainly put in the time. For the rest of that year in Vermont, I practiced incessantly. Because the farm I was working on was isolated and because I didn’t have any spare money, I didn’t have a teacher. There were a few local musicians who showed me some different things, but mostly I forged ahead on my own, a path that was both practical and not a little arrogant. As it is in most stories, my hubris was ultimately a setback because I spent so much time practicing bad habits. In music, possibly more than other art forms, it is incredibly difficult to have an accurate perception of what you are producing. Most people will have had the experience of hearing their own recorded voice played back. It is usually a bit shocking and always sounds different, not as resonant, than what you hear in your own head. Learning an instrument, where your mind is focused on unusual demands of coordination, magnifies the discrepancy between what the world hears and what you hear. To be a proficient musician, you have to learn to hear the sound from both perspectives—your own and that of the world. This, as you can imagine, is difficult. When a painter steps back to look at the canvas, she is creating a separation between herself and the art. But when a musician steps back, the music stops. A teacher can provide essential mirroring by telling the student that a note was out of tune or a rhythm badly played. Forging ahead on my own without that feedback meant that I spent many hours engraining bad habits, things that would later take a lot of time to fix.
But that’s a truth I only know through the clarity of hindsight. At the time, I thought I was doing great. More importantly, the fiddle was a huge source of joy in my life. Every new tune that I learned, every new plateau of technique, every experience of playing music with other people—each of these was a revelation, each one made me feel feelings and think thoughts that I had not known before, each of these made me see the world in a different way.
After that job ended, I traveled and brought my fiddle with me everywhere I went. For one two-month period I rented a small room in the west of Ireland and practiced about four hours a day. When I wasn’t practicing, I was listening to recordings, going to sessions to play with others, being obsessed. No matter that I was still just a beginning player. The music was my identity. It was bringing me connections to other people and a treasure trove of stories. Like the time I was hitching and got picked up by a gypsy piper who brought me back to his caravan, fed me a lunch of soft-boiled eggs, and gave me one of the best live concert recordings I have ever heard. Or those times, yes, that I played for dancers as they spun around the hall on a winter’s night.
Music was my solace and support. It was a source of joy and of identity. It was, to steal a line from an old hymn, my all in all. I cherished being seen as a fiddler, cherished having these encounters with other musicians, as if we were members of a secret and elevated tribe. And as much as that music transfixed me as a listener, I was most interested in being able to play it. I had found easy success in everything else up to that point, so I assumed that I would get what I wanted on the fiddle. That with enough practice, I would get to the same place as the music on that cassette the gypsy piper had given me, that people would speak my name and come to hear me play. What I didn’t know was how far behind I was. Though 20 is an age where we are only beginning to scratch at our adult selves, it is late in the game to be beginning as a musician.
After ten years of playing, I went to graduate school at the University of Limerick, in Ireland, to do a one-year master’s program in performance on the fiddle. A number of things fed into this decision. After six years of growing vegetables and flowers to sell at farmer’s markets, I had taken a break from farming. In that time of transition, I had been gigging a lot more and wanted to see how far I could take things musically. I was still in the same part of Vermont where I had been when I started playing fiddle and it was as musically isolated as it had always been, so moving to a bigger pond seemed sensible. Also, that coming December would mark the 20th anniversary of my father’s death and I wanted to spend more time in Ireland to connect with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. Since playing the fiddle had always been, at least in part, about seeking his posthumous approval, I wanted to get better at it. I also wanted to play his favorite slow air at the anniversary mass that his sisters offered up every year at Our Lady Of Victories, their local church just two blocks away from his childhood home. I had played the piece, a lament called For Ireland, I’d Not Tell Her Name that he would tell us he wanted played at his funeral every time he heard it, at the 10th anniversary, but I had only been playing for a year at that point and felt that I had not done it justice.
The program at the University of Limerick was a shambles. Nothing started on time, the level of academic work was low, and the facilities were poor. Also, it was headed by a self-aggrandizing piano player who once gave a lecture on himself and the importance of his own work. (Nobody went). But I was surrounded by incredible musicians, played tunes and drank too much beer in the pub every night, and had access to small master classes with the best fiddlers in the tradition. As a result of the program, I undoubtedly became a better player on a technical level. But I also lost my sense of joy. That loss is a weight that I carry still.
Studying music in whatever setting—conservatory, undergraduate, graduate—is difficult for many people. For me, the core challenge was being told daily what I was doing wrong, a challenge augmented by the fact that my identity was so tied up with music that I equated my skill as a player with my value as a person. There was never any mention of what I might have been doing right, no attempt to build up the person holding the fiddle. Just an attempt to break down the bad habits and rebuild a stronger technique. This was compounded by the fact that instead of having one core teacher, I had master classes with 15 different fiddlers, each of whom had a different idea of what I was doing wrong and of how to fix it. In Limerick, I learned how to play better. But I also changed the story that I was telling myself. Before going to school, the story of teaching myself to play was one of ingenuity and cleverness, of chance encounters and strong friendships. My new story was one of bad choices, impatience, and recriminations. I should have found a teacher at the very beginning, should have practiced proper technique from the start. I should have been modest and patient and not have rushed to play gigs before I was ready, not have sought out that external validation. I came to see those early years of playing as wasted time. Worse than wasted, I had been moving in the wrong direction and now had to spend extra time and effort to overcome those early bad habits.
In the spring of that year, I was attacked as I was walking home from campus one night. I had stopped to chat with my friend Roisín by the side of the road and a young teenager came up from behind and hit me over the head with a glass bottle. As such incidents go, it wasn’t that bad. They (he was with two friends) didn’t take anything from me and I wasn’t seriously hurt. The bottle broke when he hit me and my scalp bled a great deal, but beyond ruining the shoes I was wearing there was no lasting damage. Not physically, anyways. Emotionally, the attack left me in a very dark place. For a few weeks, I didn’t do much beyond absent-mindedly practice the accordion while watching Star Trek reruns in my apartment. The friend I had been living with, also a master’s student and also struggling with the program, was gone much of that spring, so I was alone a lot. Unconsciously, the attack must have triggered emotional memories of Tom’s attack on my dad: both were unprovoked, both involved blows to the head. I couldn’t understand why someone would do that to me. The director of my program (not the self-aggrandizing piano player who oversaw the whole music department, but Niall, an always affable flute player) offered me a medical leave with the option of coming back for my final performance whenever I was able. But I wanted to just be done with it and to put Limerick, and that sense of failure, behind me.
What do I mean by failure? For me, failure means that I have not achieved the level of playing that I expected of myself. What I sought was to play Irish music at the highest possible level. I expected a professional career of concerts and recording, of accolades and, probably most important, acknowledgment of my skill from the traditional community. My internal sense of success, then, has always been based on external validation. Put so bluntly, that sounds obviously unhealthy, but I don’t feel I’m alone in pinning my hopes on the approval of others.
Irish dance music is one of the most virtuosic folk traditions in the world. The melodies are intricate, ornamented, have a highly developed structure, and are played at speed. I believe virtuosity is an aesthetic preference and not a universal good, so I do not mean to suggest that Irish music is better, nor do I mean to suggest that there are not other virtuosic folk traditions in the world. But there are many that are far less ornate. The Irish music community prizes virtuosity. The majority of the musicians held up as the pinnacles of the tradition are highly technically accomplished, a trend that has accelerated in recent decades with the popular system of contests held by Comhaltas Ceoltoiri na hEireann, an organization that promotes traditional music. Comhaltas sponsors classes around the country and also organizes a series of fleadhs (an Irish word that means ‘gathering’) where musicians compete as soloists and in small ensembles. The regional fleadhs lead to the all-Ireland, which is held in a different town each year. The senior solo contests on traditional instruments (fiddle, pipes, flute, whistle, accordion, concertina, banjo, voice) are a central highlight of the gathering and winning the all-Ireland is something many strive for. All this competition does have a positive side: it motivates people to practice and has clearly raised the mean level of technical proficiency. But competition also makes us all smaller. It reduces the scope of the music by limiting what is played in competitions so that the adjudicators are assessing something consistent. It pits us against each other, and encourages complexity for it’s own sake.
And yet I cannot pin all of the blame, or even the majority of it, on the competitive nature of the community. The deeper truth is that I ran up against the limits of my own talent, which would seem to grant that I can be a competent fiddler but not an exceptional one. In recent years, Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the concept of the 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers. By looking at a diverse group of high-achieving people, he theorizes that the uniting factor is that each has spent at least 10,000 hours practicing their craft. Therefore, anyone wishing to master a craft must put in those 10,000 hours. Fair enough. You have to put in the time. But by codifying this rule, Gladwell implies that the inverse is true: if you put in the time, you will master the craft. I don’t think this holds, but the logical sleight-of-hand that gets us there goes back at least as far as Socrates, who asked Hippias (paraphrased), “If one knows the good, must one do the good?” That is, what is the relationship of knowledge to virtue? As was his wont, Socrates tied Hippias up in circles of questions, but the true fallacy of his argument was this: knowledge may be necessary for virtue but it is not sufficient for virtue. Since, for Socrates, craft was a common analogy for virtue, this bears upon the question of practice and talent. Those 10,000 hours may be necessary for mastery, but they are not sufficient for it. At some point, innate talent has to be part of the mix. This is easy enough to see in something like sports where, despite my fondest adolescent dreams, at 5’10” and slow I was never going to be bound for the NBA no matter how many hours I spent shooting free throws. But music is a genius without obvious physical traits. Some fiddlers have fingers like sausages, others long and slender, some hands so small it’s hard to see how they even reach the notes. With the raw material of talent kept invisible, it’s easy to imagine that you have an abundance of it.
One of the hardest things in music is learning to hear yourself as others hear you. When I was playing fiddle in those early years, I sounded just like my musical heroes in my head. This, obviously, was not how I sounded to the outside world. As I studied more, I learned to hear myself with a second set of ears, an outside and more objective listening, the true and painful fruit of which is that the more you advance, the more you see how you have been deluding yourself. Every artist has to contend with the discrepancy between what they want to create and the reality of what they actually produce. It is as if there is always this ideal form right ahead of you, a perfection that you are always chasing. Dancer and choreographer Martha Graham has said, ‘No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.” But for her, this is a “queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes ‘us’ more alive than the others.” For me, not the genius that Graham was, this dissatisfaction has not been divine. Instead, accepting the limitations of my talent has been an immense challenge.
Shona mbira music also contains virtuosity. It is thickly layered and complex and the best players, playing only with two thumbs and the right index finger, make one instrument sound like two or three people are present. But virtuosity feels less like the goal and more like a possible outcome. In the Shona conception of the universe, there are these layers of ancestor spirits that a part of daily life in ways it is hard for Westerners to understand. Asking these ancestors for guidance and support is a regular occurrence. The mbira plays a central role in connecting us to these spirits, especially when it is played for a bira, an all-night ceremony in which a spirit medium becomes possessed. When someone plays the mbira, Shona people believe that is actually shave (pron. ‘shah-veh’) spirits that are playing through living fingers. Describing the way that mbira music fits together, Erica Azim writes:
When two mbiras are played together, the interlocking parts result in a compact yet overflowing richness of polyphony and polyrhythm. Each piece in the traditional repertoire includes a kushaura (leading) part and a kutsinhira (intertwining) part. No part of the cycle of the piece is identified as the beginning. The kushaura musician starts playing his mbira part at the point in the cycle that he hears at that moment. After a few notes or cycles, the kutsinhira player enters at the point in the cycle that he hears—possibly a completely different point from the one where the kushaura player began, but the interlock of the two parts is fixed and must be correct. The end of a performance may also be placed at any point in the cycle. Mbira players often find that they hear mbira continuously, even when the instrument is not actually being played, both when awake and while dreaming. So, the start of a performance is merely joining with the music already being heard.
What a powerful way to remove ego from the practice of being a musician. By believing that spirits are using you as a vessel and that the music is going all the time, a stream to join with when you are able, the responsibility for the sounds created by your fingers becomes shared with the broader world. What’s more, when you play the mbira, you often hear sounds that you are not directly creating. The prosaic explanation is that these sounds are created by the strong overtones of each metal key, often an octave and a major seventh above the fundamental. When you are playing fluidly, you hear this other line of melody emerge, related to but eerily distinct from the one you are playing. The other explanation is that this line is the spirit’s voice.
Learning to play the mbira has been immensely challenging because it required first learning to understand a music totally foreign from what I had known. After 8 years, I am only scratching at the surface, a surface I will still only be scratching at in another 20. Mastering the instrument is an incredibly rare thing for a Westerner to do, which is a relief. With that off of the table, and with ego at a remove, learning to play has been much more focused on the joy of exploration. As with learning to play the fiddle, the mbira has connected to me some truly wonderful people. It has made me laugh and given me some great stories. Like sitting in a car in the rain outside a nightclub in Harare, fitting the pieces together correctly for the first time with my first teacher, Cosmas. Or loading up the back of a pick-up with beer so we could have an mbira party at Chiyanike’s homestead in Ringa, beginning with prayers to ancestors in the kitchen and playing all night as the women danced in the dark of that round hut. Or playing here at home with my friend Jon just a few days before he died of the throat cancer he chose not to treat. Who showed me that we don’t need to fear death, who was curious to the end, and who believed that music was a stream always flowing that we could choose to ride on at any time.
The mbira has also frustrated me. More than other music I am aware of, the mbira tradition plays with perception. In Nhema musasa, the first piece I ever learned, the notes alternate between the fingers of each hand. Because of that physical experience, I first heard the piece as if it were in 4. Right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left became fixed in my mind as 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and. This is wrong. The piece is actually in 3, which means the placement of the beat alternates between hands, like this: Right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left-right-left. 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3. After Jon died, and because I knew he never would have let the mistake go for so long, I tackled retraining myself to hear Nhema musasa properly. I had been avoiding that because I knew it would be hard, and had hoped that some magic switch would flip someday through exposure to other pieces in the tradition. It turns out that the magic switch was focused practice and lots of repetition. The crazy thing is that what my fingers were doing never changed, but how I perceived them did. Now I hear the song in 3 and it’s way more fun to play, but making that switch remains one of the harder musical lessons I’ve tackled.
I do not know why my experience of the mbira has been so consistently different than my experience of the fiddle. On the mbira, I forgive myself for my faults. On the fiddle, I castigate myself for them. On the mbira, I am in no rush to get anywhere. On the fiddle, I have been striving since day one. Some part of the difference is endemic to the respective communities, the ways in which they uphold or deemphasize the role of the individual. But people in the Irish music community also speak of themselves as being vessels for something larger, also speak of the music being bigger than the musician. Another part of it has to do with personal history, and with wanting to do something that I know my dad would have loved. I’m not playing for the same stakes on the mbira. And possibly I just haven’t yet reached the limit of my innate talent on the mbira. What I love more than anything else is learning itself. This is why I’ve tried my hand at so many different things: furniture, farming, accordion, whistle, banjo, weaving, bee-keeping, visual art, and more. It may be that I will grow dissatisfied when I reach my limit on the mbira, though that day seems impossibly far-off.
Why, then, have I not quit the fiddle? It would be possible, after all, to decide that I would be better off letting go of something that has been the source of so much angst. When I was in college, and an avid writer of poetry, my creative writing professor had us each write a manifesto, declaring the whys and wherefores of our own work. In writing that I came to see that the reasons I read poetry and the reasons I wrote poetry were completely different. I would not have read my own poetry. To my professor’s dismay, I decided the most logical response to that dissonance was to quit writing poems. Since then I’ve produced the occasional love poem or filled in a few missing lines in a song, but I’ve never identified as a poet. And there is no way in which I regret that decision. My life has been full, art of all sorts has continued to play a major role, and I have connected with others and come to know myself better—which had been the main point of writing for me.
Letting go of the fiddle would not be so easy a choice. I have learned so much from holding it in my hands: devotion, an imperfect patience, some level of humility. I love the music. I love that is the music of my people. I love the soul and the beauty of it. The moments when I have been inside of it, when I have truly been just a vessel, have been some of the finest moments of my life. In 1942, Marcus Martin, a fiddler from North Carolina, was recorded by Alan Lomax. After Martin finished playing Bonaparte’s Retreat, Lomax asked him what he thought music was for. “Well,” replied the fiddler, “it is for the upbuilding of people. I mean that it’s the highest, the most high thing.” I return to this quote so often because it so perfectly captures what I believe. Music is the most high thing, and Irish fiddle music lifts me up higher than anything else.
And surely there must be some value in coming up against your own limits. William Sloane Coffin, the prominent clergyman and peace activist, has said that “just as a stream has no chance of running deep until it finds its banks, so we, until we discover our limits, have not a prayer of becoming profound.” To be defined by your limitations is also to be defined by your persistence. Indeed, one of my central axioms with students is that limits are essential to great art, a position that’s easier to espouse as a teacher than it is to accept as a seeker. Most often when I invoke this axiom, I am using limitations to mean the boundaries of style that are either tacitly accepted as part of a tradition, as when I compose a shape-note and accept those stylistic limits, or boundaries that are self-imposed by the artist, as with late period Rothko, say, when he was exploring the limits of what one could do with only rectangles and color. But it is just as valid a statement if we understand it to mean personal limitations. History is full of artists—Van Gogh, Django, etc.—who had to contend with personal shortcomings that forced them to develop unique and powerful personal styles. The image of the stream is easy to understand. The water, held in place by its banks, carves a deeper channel. Thus was the Grand Canyon formed. And while the mechanism of creating personal depth is less obvious, I think that Sloane’s metaphor holds. When we are forced to confront our limits, we have to turn that energy to another purpose. Hopefully that leads us to a deeper place, a place beyond technique where we can consider questions of love and spirit.
Earlier, I took Gladwell to task for implying that 10,000 hours of practice is sufficient for mastery because he leaves out the question of innate talent. But there must be more to the story. As surely as talent is needed, another essential ingredient must be love: a love that motivates you, a love that allows you to focus on the journey and not the outcome. As musicians, we have a relationship with our instrument, sometimes easy and sometimes fraught, but one that can only endure fueled by love. All relationships start with one person pursuing the other and hinge upon that moment when the pursuit is returned, when each person is both hunter and hunted, both seeker and sought. The true pain, then, of playing the fiddle has been feeling that my ardor has not been returned, at least not in the form of achievement and mastery. It’s not that I’ve failed, it’s that I feel like a jilted lover.
And while it’s true that the Irish music community is competitive and prioritizes virtuosity, it also gives great weight to something we call the nyah. Like most things mystical, the nyah is hard to define but generally refers to a deeper spirit that inhabits someone’s playing, a more profound understanding of the way that this music can transport us across the thin veil separating the worlds. Other words that people use to talk about this idea are ‘a lonesome touch’ or draoicht, which is the Irish word for ‘magic’. For, like the way that Shona musicians believe that the mbira connects them to the spirits, there is a belief in Ireland—stronger among the older generation that is passing now—that the generative source of the tunes was in world of the fairies. Hence tune names like The Fairy Reel, Sí Bheag Sí Mhor, and Port na bPúcái, all of which refer to that other world (the second two mean ‘Big fairy hill, little fairy hill’ and ‘Song of the pooka’, respectively). In its description then—deep in spirit, transporting, magical—the nyah is not that different from a form of love.
Port na bPúcái is one of my favorite airs. Tony MacMahon, a brilliant accordion player, had this to say about its origins and about playing airs in general.
This tune comes from the Great Blasket Island. It’s a tune that was brought to us, brought out of the island, by one of the last fiddle players who left there in the early 1960s and is called in the Irish language, Port na bPúcái, which translated means ‘the music of the ghosts’. It’s a little piece of music which, in a sense, shows that in Ireland, in this part of Europe, that we’re not governed by laws and mechanics. We have the old religions, the old feelings, the belief that rocks and rivers and mountains are inhabited by spirits. And that tune, in a sense, is a lonely way of bringing that out, which is the reason I like to play it.
When MacMahon was still young, so the story goes, Seamus Ennis—piper, storyteller, tradition-bearer—leaned over to him while he was playing an air, in a passing of the torch kind of way, and said, “Now, put the shiver in it.” And oh, what shiver. Ennis also had this to say about the nyah, or, as he called it, the truckly-how.
You know, there’s an awful lot to be said
for this Irish traditional
folk music and folklore, because
first of all,
you have to learn it.
and first you must learn the talk.
and then you must learn the grip.
and after that, you must learn the truckly-how.
and then
you have the whole lot
only just to keep on practicing it.
Because
Seamus Ennis knows far more about this
than even the old Folk Lordy-Lordy themselves.
Because Seamus Ennis
once met a little Leprashoneen Truckly-How
at the bottom of the Garden Doth and up the Garden Path
which came up from that,
in the Limeretti-Lumeretti Hillhockers,
before the Earthian Throe,
before the Leprashonerian—
long before the Argay Foray—
and that was in the Deep Pong Doom
before the Emerald Isle was dropped
in the water.
Whichever instrument I am playing, my central flaw of impatience is the same. I rush. I play faster than my technique allows, and so the details are garbled and imprecise. My ornaments, a defining characteristic of Irish music, are often sloppy. When I focus on them in practice, I can do them cleanly but when I’m playing in public I revert to bad habits. My intonation is still dogged by those early years of lazy listening and by hours of practicing the wrong thing, the real truth not being that practice makes perfect, but that practice makes permanent.
The difference is that when I make these mistakes on the fiddle, they feed the story of having failed. But when I make mistakes on the mbira, mostly they make me laugh. When I’m playing mbira, I feel like I’m exploring. Sometimes those explorations lead to hitting a really bad note, and that strikes me as funny.
The central question: why are these stories so different? And how do I change my fiddle story to one that I can carry? It is no secret to myself that my hope in writing this is to finally find the magic switch that releases my inner genius, that I’ll be both fearless and grounded with the fiddle. For years I’ve said that if I were to find a djinn in a bottle, I would spend all three wishes to play the music I dream of. But maybe the better wish would be to regain that initial joy I felt when I had just started playing. Maybe the best wish of all would be to know what the point of it all has been.
For that’s the real crux of the thing. We want our stories to have a moral, and part of the reason I’ve struggled so much with the fiddle is that I want my effort to mean something. I am afraid that, if I were to put it down for good, it will have meant nothing at all. But what if, for me, the purpose has been something different? My choral compositions and my fusion of mbira music with Appalachian ballads are far more unique than anything else I do. Both of these, the things that only I can offer the world, have been fed by the sense of melody I’ve developed playing the fiddle. Songs I’ve composed have moved people to tears, have been sung at deathbeds and weddings, at World AIDS day in Edinburgh and atop Mt. Kilimanjaro. They are songs that nobody else will write. On the fiddle, all I’ve ever wanted is to play the same tunes as everyone else, but better. What does that bring to the world?
Deeper yet. If failure is a weight to carry, I do not want to have carried this thing around my neck for so long and to no point. But what if the true point of failure is to have failed? And, by having failed, to gain an empathy for everybody else who has also failed at something they hold dear? The murder of my father when I was young was devastating, but it has also been a powerful source of understanding other people’s pain. There may also be something central underlining these reflections that come from my stage of life. Having just recently crested 40, I am ever more aware of the fact that, to quote the journalist Chris Bachelder, “middle age is the time when we begin to square ambition with reality, to understand that forces far beyond our control have far more power than we have previously granted [...] In middle age, we begin to see that shortcoming is the rule.”
Coming up short is the most common story of all, and that drive to be exceptional through music is the drive to avoid this common failure. But most people, by definition, are not exceptional. And every bit as common as coming up short is the story of an artist who struggles with their art. Many people who play multiple instruments have an easier relationship with one, have one where they struggle and strive. And if we take artist as a stand-in for human, artists being the people who bare their lives and their process to the public so that we can see our own story reflected, then maybe this in some way is the story of all of us: failing, coming up short, still striving.
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, tells the childhood story of finding a hole in the fence behind his house and being surprised when a hand appeared, the tiny hand of a boy his own age who offered up a toy sheep through the hole. The young Neruda, delighted by the treasure, went into the house and brought back a treasure of his own, “a pinecone, opened, full of odor and resin, which [he] adored.” He set it in the hole in exchange for the sheep. And though he never saw the hand nor the boy again, that childhood story taught him a lesson about our yearning for connection:
To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses — that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
Is that, finally, the answer? We are bound to fail because everybody is bound to fail? That only by understanding that truth can we have the empathy to see the hole in the fence and the yearning to reach our hand through it? Is that what you really meant, Boss? Did you know how difficult that would be?