Music in the Park

I play in a folk band, and yesterday we had a gig downtown here in Valparaiso, in the new amphitheater here. The weather was glorious and the farmer's market was on. Folks were milling around sampling cheese and sizing up the basil plants. Right in front of the stage was a splash pad--a set of fountain jets built into the cobblestone, from which, at timed intervals, the water shoots and retreats, shoots and retreats. The pad was up and running for the kids, and while we played up on the stage they pattered around down below in their bathing suits, many of them dancing to our tunes. Our harmony singer was super-charmed by these dancers, all of whom were kindergarten or preschool age. Between numbers she kept saying to them "thank you for your help." And of course they were helping; mirroring the music back to us, the way the lake water gives back the image of the lily, or the way a kite with its swooping and fluttering renders visible the actions of the invisible wind. There were folks on lawn chairs and park benches, some of them just talking with one another, some of them just watching their kids, some of them just being our fans, singing along with our tunes. Also there were two small domed tents out on the grass: "Shade Shack" one of them was labeled. Kids came crawling out of these and went crawling back in, like snails with multiple personalities. All in all, it was the most pleasant sort of way to spend two hours that I can imagine. And I call attention to that word "pleasant"--just a simple word, rather bland. Denoting nothing extraordinary, nothing thrilling, nothing spectacular. Just sweet mental manna. Just the ordinary daily miracle of perception and enjoyment, requiring nothing more from us than our social presence and a capacity for appreciation and immersion. All you have to do is be there, and you're part of the project. Helping to increase the joy.

One of the happier aspects of playing in such a venue at such a time, is that there's no need to feel any nervousness, no need to obsess over every note; you can just play and enjoy yourself, and allow your enjoyment to radiate exactly as it wishes to, to whoever cares to listen. You can give up the fetish of individual expression--something we place too much value on in my opinion, even at the cost of privacy, dignity and trusting relationships--and instead give yourself wholly over to the service of  that larger project of sweetly passing the time, the same project in which (again) everyone else around you is involved as well.

Note please I'm not saying something so simple-minded and lazy as--"you can just play and not really worry about playing the right notes, because no one's really listening." Quite the contrary! I'm simply saying that the motivation for getting things right is centered somewhere other than the self, with its often intemperate need to impose itself on others, or to match or exceed their expectations. Instead it comes from a general feeling of rightness in your surroundings, and a feeling of unity with those surroundings and with the general project of life as it's expressing itself there in that given moment. Ideally of course you should always want to erase yourself and join yourself to the band and the music and the emotional life of the audience--that's how the best music happens--but I'm saying that's often a harder thing to do under intimate conditions, in which the audience is right there, all ears, absolutely attending; that's when pride and worry and the desire to impress folks with sham virtuosity easily cloud the musical mind. At least for me. But give me surroundings in which I myself am witness to the true spirit of Play around me--again, children dancing, a fountain splashing--and it's all so infectious, it enters me and inspires me to "play" my instrument, and "play" it in the most literal sense of the word "play."

Our downtown park is nearly brand new. Just three years ago in fact what covered that space was an eyesore of a bank parking lot. And how wonderful it is that, when the opportunity presented itself, certain bright minds in our city saw, in that space, as in a crystal ball, all sorts of possibilities for a renewal of civic life. Their hard work has borne fruit. And yet isn't it also sad, that for so many years there wasn't any space like this for us to enjoy? It's sad to think of all the fun we missed.

James Kunstler in his blog and books writes regularly about the infrastructure necessary to a robust civic life--parks and civic centers, community gardens, old opera houses, the lawns of court house squares--and I heartily agree with his assessment that America sadly lacks such socially activated infrastructure, and indeed has spent much of the last century industriously destroying or balefully neglecting what infrastructure it had once dedicated to the purpose of play and shared experience: letting the bandstands at the parks rot away, allowing the growth of the suburbs, like a tumor, bleed all shared civic life and social energy from the heart of the city. It is my hope that we've reached the limits of that immensely destructive experiment and are ready to admit the error of our ways.

So let's get on with it! Rebuild, replant, renew!

HB