The following remarks are from a speech I was asked to make at a Kiwanis scholarship banquet on April 24, 2014 at Shadow Hills Country Club in Eugene, Oregon.
The evening began with the attendees singing together “God Bless America”
and “Oh, Canada” as the event was called to order. My original text included a ruse to get the group to sing “Happy Birthday”, a plan that was rendered unnecessary by the singing of the two aforementioned songs. This version of the speech includes a couple of paragraphs about my grandson, Henry, which time constraints prevented me from including at the banquet. Those paragraphs are included here as italicised text enclosed in brackets.
Good evening. My name is Mike McCornack, and before I get started with my talk, I’d like to ask if any of our honored students has a birthday somewhere near today’s date.
If you’d all please join me in singing. [Happy Birthday song]
Congratulations, [name]. And thanks to all of you who sang along.
So, let’s think about what we just did. Yes, we sang “Happy Birthday” to [name]. But we also came together as a community to celebrate [name]. This was not a performance; this was a manifestation of community.
And what did you, as an individual, do? Most of you sang. Now I’d be willing to bet that if I were to go around the room and ask each one of you, “are you are a singer?” many of you would answer, “No!” And yet, you just sang, as I suspect you’ve done for many birthdays over the years for your family and friends.
So you sing, but some of you are reluctant call yourselves singers. Why do you suppose that is? This is what I want to talk to you about tonight.
[This last October, my wife and I were blessed to welcome into the world our first grandchild, Henry. We love Henry, as a lot of other people around him do. Now Henry at six months of age has a number of obvious limitations; his vocabulary is negligible, his math skills are lacking, he hasn’t made the soccer team, and I think if he were to take the SAT’s right now, he wouldn’t do very well. But Henry shares one important trait with his peer group of other babies: he is a pretty sophisticated musician. He already knows how to use his voice to get people around him to respond. He uses a variety of tones, a number of inflections, and the tempo of his delivery to communicate his needs and desires. As he grows, he continues to adapt his vocal skills in ever more sophisticated ways as his needs and desires become more complex. He is also a sophisticated listener. It’s not uncommon for Henry’s family to communicate with him using similar vocal techniques to those that Henry himself uses. When he’s upset, long sustained tones seem to calm him. When he’s somber, light staccato ascending vocalizations will often bring on a smile. Some of the vocalizations that Henry’s family employs are just that; improvised vocal sounds. But many are music in the more formal sense, lullabies and other songs. These days a guaranteed way for his mom and dad to make him smile is for them to sing Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy” from Despicable Me and dance a silly dance as Henry joins in.
Henry is not a unique baby in his involvement in communication through sound and music. All healthy babies use and respond to sound in a somewhat similar fashion. I dare say that everyone in this room did the same as a baby. And I suggest to you that this use of sound by infants is something we can correctly refer to as music, a very fundamental music to be sure, but music nonetheless.]
My wife and I have done a lot of performing for children over the years, and we have observed an interesting correlation between some children’s distance from infancy and their level of musical inhibition. Young toddlers are far more universally open in their response to music than older preschoolers may be, and as children age through their elementary school years, some of them seem to become increasingly more musically inhibited. Some children appear to unlearn musicality as they grow.
So why do some of us make the transition from being musical babies to being adults who profess to be not musical? I think that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that corresponds with the increasing availability of broadcast and recorded music over the last three or four generations.
Having high-quality recorded musical performances easily available has changed the way we interact with music. It has made music a commodity, something that we have or own, not just something we do.
When my great-grandparents were children, if they wanted music, they made it themselves. There was no radio, no recorded music available. Singing was something they did to help pass the time. It was something they did while they worked, at church, at family gatherings, and at birthday parties.
By the time my generation came along, broadcast or recorded music was more widely available, but not yet everywhere.
When I was young, a radio in a car was an uncommon luxury, and something that my family didn’t have. So when we went on trips, we sang.
During my lifetime, I’ve seen an explosive evolution of how recorded music has been made easily available. I’ve heard music on records, from 78 rpm’s, to 45’s, to LP’s; on tape, through reel-to-reel, 8-track, and cassette; to CD’s, to MP3’s, to streamed music. Recorded music has continued to become ever more portable, first with transistor radios and car radios, then the cassette walkman, followed by MP3 players, and now smartphones. A visitor from another planet might wonder why all humans seem to have wires dangling from their ears.
To paraphrase The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Music, Music everywhere, but not a song to sing.”
I love having any music I want available to me anytime, anywhere. But it worries me that all this music is being made for us, and when we are surrounded by recorded musical perfection, it’s no wonder we listen to our own voices and feel imperfect and unworthy by comparison. And so, many of us choose to become musical couch potatoes, out of self-preservation.
So let me tell you how I became a music teacher. When I was the same age as our honored guests, a senior in high school, I had plans to become either an electrical engineer or an actor; one practical goal, and one pipe dream. I had been accepted into Oregon State University as an engineering major, and I had my dorm room and roommate all set. The job I had at the time was playing music with a wonderful young woman with a beautiful voice. I’ll spare you the suspense; that young woman would become my wife six years later.
But at the time, playing music was my job, albeit a fun one, and a pretty good way to make money to pay for college. To be honest, I did not consider myself a musician with a capital “M”; I was a person who enjoyed making music, was pretty good at it, and got paid for it, but I wasn’t a trained expert. I considered myself a “folk musician”. When I compared myself to so-called classical musicians, to kids who had had 8 years of piano or violin lessons, or to music teachers, I saw myself on the wrong side of a gulf that was uncrossable.
I have a sign above my desk, which reads, “Life is what happens while we are making other plans”. My college plans, and my music making soon became an example of this axiom. People seemed to really like the music my partner and I were making. We were given opportunities to travel and make much more money than we had ever imagined, just for making our music.
Our musical career began to expand, and that meant that I could only attend college in fits and starts. I became very good at racking up academic credits one or two semesters at a time, and then taking off on another musical adventure.
The things that happened to me while I was “making other plans” were mostly wonderful. Along the way I realized that my musical partner was also very well suited to me as a life partner, and she and I got married. At this point two things conspired to change my life. Though I was not a smoker, I had a highly suspicious chest x-ray that my doctor attributed to the secondhand smoke I was taking in while we performed. Secondly, we began to consider having a family. While we knew some folks had combined road careers and family life, we decided against it. I decided to try to find another career.
I tried my hand at selling recording studio services, running a retail store, attempting to gain an apprenticeship as an electrician, and working for the phone company. In each case I was either unsuccessful or unhappy. My ever-patient wife eventually suggested to me, at one particularly low point in my life, that I might consider becoming a music teacher. I was highly skeptical. But after talking to my wife, I decided to visit a very good friend, the late Gary Brown, who at the time was the choir director at Springfield High School. Gary was very encouraging. He didn’t see the gap that I believed existed between the world of the “regular people music” that I knew, and academic and classical music. I followed up my visit with Gary by a visit to the University of Oregon, where I had the opportunity to talk at length with the man who was then Dean of the School of Music, Dr. Robert Trotter.
My discussion with Bob Trotter was deeply inspiring, for I found that my views of music, which I had thought were rather unsophisticated and naive, were very close to his own. He was ecstatic about his life studying music as a center of our personal and cultural lives, something which happened to have an artistic component as well. He told me he thought music education needed people like me. Given where I was in my life at that moment, it was great to feel needed!
My wife had cast the line, Gary Brown set the hook, and Dr. Trotter reeled me in. I enrolled as a music education major that Fall and I have never looked back.
As I stand here tonight, I am just past the other end of my career as a music teacher and choir director, a career that began essentially accidentally while I was making other plans.
I retired this past June, still loving my job, and loving the opportunity that I have had to work with kids and music and my community.
What I’d like to do now is to see if I can sum up what I learned during the 29 years that I spent teaching about life through music in the company of some wonderful young people. Here’s what I think I now know:
- Music is an innate part of us. Harvard Psychologist Dr. Howard Gardner identifies music as one of the eight component parts that make up our natural intelligence. Our musical intelligence is a distinct and integral part of who we are.
- Music doesn’t have to be perfect, or even good, to be enjoyable. You don’t have to be LeBron James to have fun shooting baskets.
- When we make music together, we create a bond, a sense of community. Electronic Music pioneer Brian Eno said “That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us.” One of the great joys I had in my classroom was to watch and hear a variety of students making music together. These were students who might not otherwise even notice each other. My choirs had 4.0 students singing with special education students, athletes singing with math nerds, social winners singing with the shy and the lonely. But when they sang, they were each an important part of the community.
- Art is part of music, but not all music has to be art. Sometimes it’s just fun. It can be medicine, or spirituality, or politics, or a birthday party, or a way to teach. Can you think of the ABC’s without hearing the song?
- Music can amplify it’s context to a greater level of meaning and power. Many people of my generation cannot think of the civil rights movement without hearing “We Shall Overcome”. The song became the container of the movement, the soundtrack to social change.
- Music is central to life’s rituals. There is a reason we have music at weddings, at funerals, at inaugurations, at memorials. There is a reason that when music happens our feelings surge, our joy overcomes us, or our tears flow.
Finally, there are two things I would like to address especially to the students we are honoring tonight. First, let me go back to that sign above my desk: “Life is what happens while we are making other plans”. I hope that all of you have great plans, and I hope that you find success and satisfaction in your lives. But if what you plan, and what you end up doing, turn out to be different things, try not to worry; enjoy the ride. Success may lie in directions you never even imagined.
Secondly, I want to say something to you that I used to say to all of my graduating seniors. Near graduation time I would pull them aside and tell them this:
It’s okay if none of you want to become professional musicians, or music teachers, or even consumers of commercial music. That’s not why we spent this time together.
But I will ask this of you: If you are fortunate enough to have children in your lives, please, sing to them. Listen as they sing to you. Sing with them. Let them know that music comes from people, not just from electronic boxes. It’s a natural and simple way to create a communion of family from the day a child is born, and children who grow up nurtured by the music of their families will be far more likely to retain their natural musicality, and far better equipped to help us find among ourselves, a community. If you give a child music, you are giving them an important gift that may just help them survive with some grace in the complex world that we are all struggling to live in, as all of us are making other plans.
Thank you.