Tag Archives: In a music house

Goals and Dreams, Health and Long Life, Music and Theatre, Musical resolutions

In a Music House part 3, crashing a party

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We crashed their party, and when I say we, I mean two genXers – both of them dads – and me, the gray-haired baby-boomer. “Let’s go down,” said my 47-year-old son, “And ask if we can jam with them.” He was talking to me, but mostly to a former bandmate who was visiting from out of town. Down we trooped, to the well-appointed basement studio. “Can we set in?” I called, feeling very much like a nuisance neighborhood kid. Now I ask you, how can two sixteen-year-olds, one seated on the throne and the other slapping a bass, refuse the dad who shelled out the lettuce for all the equipment? And how can they refuse grandma? Captain picked up a second bass (Tennille was upstairs chatting with the mom of the graduate). Kvon grabbed the guitar and started setting options on the pedal board. I flipped the switch on the keyboard stack and got…nothing – this is not my studio and the sound man is AWOL. So I moved to the Hammond which was live last time I was here, pulled a few tabs, disengaged some buttons and full-throttled the Leslies. We’ll play in “A” said the captain to the co-bassist. So I did. Played “A” for about ten minutes. Played A 440 on the upper manual and A 440 on the lower manual and A 880 and riffed the notes in between. Eventually, I slide off the bench and drifted away to greet cousins and walk the old homestead. The teenagers switched instruments and cross-trained. But for a moment there, it felt like old times. I’m even saddle-sore from dangling my legs off an organ bench. And what of the graduate, the person who precipitated this event?

He wasn’t manning the keyboards, instead, he was playing video games with his classmates. Are they wasting time? No. Think of it as research. He’ll design something someday, a game that integrates original music and video and creativity and it will be a hit. Because all this is what you do; all this is at your fingertips, when you were raised in a music and media house, with grandparents who were songwriters, engineers, and bandleaders in the 70s and great grands who knew how to raise the roof at gospel camp meetings. 

***

I returned to the music house today after a job interview of sorts. Like most interviews I have been to, this one included a fair amount of listening on my part – listening to the story of another and absorbing the information between the lines and applying it to my life, shaping an opinion and a proposal. Unlike most interviews I have ever been to, this one ended with me sitting on a piano bench playing a medley of popular tunes whilst the retiring piano man wandered off to talk to the restaurant owner. “I told him he should hire you,” he said. “When he asked me why, I said because you guessed the correct amount of money in the tip jar.” He laughed and played a few tunes for me. I thanked him and walked back home, declining a ride in his convertible. After all, it’s only a few blocks and the weekend weather is fine. Walking gives me a chance to soak in the neighborhood ambience and hear various kinds of music wafting out the doors of houses and food establishments. My own house is no exception. When I arrived home live music was filtering through the open screen. Laid back guitar riffs, a bit of funk, nice steady patterns on percussion, perfect for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Andrea sat on the cahon, hand-drumming snare and bass and adding tambourine fills with her foot. My guitar was in the hands of someone obviously more capable than I who was effortlessly picking and strumming. A mandolin and a bass lay in open cases nearby. They’ve gone to do some grocery shopping now, and I just spent another hour at the keyboard improvising old favorite tunes. It’s a fine thing to live in a music house, and an even finer thing to have a musical family.

Four generations worth of musical instruments in this studio
This is the Diamond Belle Saloon where four time Olde Tyme Piano champion, Adam Swanson, plays six nights a week
This is the Jean-Pierre French Bakery where Cherry Odelberg will supplement her retirement by busking for breakfast and brunch on the weekends
Health and Long Life, Music and Theatre, Musical resolutions, The Rules, Uncategorized

Free Music

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Yesterday, I did it. It’s taken me 14 months, but I finally played an original, complete, coherent, eight bar melody on the public chimes at the top of the sky steps at Ft Lewis College. You may well ask why it has taken me so long. After all, college music theory III required a complete Sonata of three movements plus coda in less than a semester’s time -half of which time was spent learning the rules governing a sonata. My sonata, named something prosaic like Praxis Sonata, critically acclaimed by the entire class, garnered me only a B on my final report card. A B!  In music! Even then, I knew my instructor was generous. Why? Because he knew something my classmates did not know. I had failed to analyze the piece – to mark in the jots and tittles right on the music. And though I worked frantically with my pencil on the bound and presentable copy whilst other students performed ahead of me, I had not completed the analysis before the final bell. 

Give me seven giant, floor-mounted windchimes at the top of a trail and two attached mallets, what could possibly be difficult? I’ll tell you what: They never gave me the rules. I have spent a year trying to figure out the theory of the thing. Not diatonic. Not arranged in ascending or descending chronological order. One of them is even out of tune with the other. Seven. Not six like guitar strings. Not a major scale. Not a mode. Nada. Not an Aeolian harp. I discovered the chimes early in March 2020 and played them at each passing so my ear could make out the pattern. No pattern developed. By Labor Day I could play two bars of the French Marseillaise, but after that, the available tones gave out. I pondered what I knew of world music and puttered about making incidental riffs whenever I hiked in that neighborhood. Most of the hikers and stair step masters ignore the presence of the chimes. They wear motivational earbuds so what do they care? Once, and one time only in the entire 14 months, I saw a child walking away from the chimes. Otherwise, the chimes are my oyster and mine alone, I guess. I’ve heard oysters need irritation to compose pearls. I was plenty perplexed.

With March 2021 came the advent of distanced outdoor concerts downtown every Friday. On the walk home, it seemed only natural to take in the art gallery in my path. And there I saw them; miniature, hand-held tone bars in sets of five. What were they? Freetone bells. Freetone bells made by the same artist responsible for several outdoor musical installations around the community including parks, pre-schools and Ft. Lewis College. Not one of the five tone sets is just like any other. They are all free. Each sounds its own unique pitch without regard for harmony or the chime hanging next in line. 

Do you know what that means? No rules. You are free to strike any chime you like in no particular order. But me? I’m still bound to the definition of music as organized sound. I’ve spent a good deal of time and research trying to get to know these chimes. So far, I’ve got them organized into 8 bars of passable melody. I’ve still got to figure out how to work one outstanding chime into the mix, but six out of seven isn’t bad – it’s kind of like my life. Here’s to the future; with or without rules!

Emotional Health, Goals and Dreams, Music and Theatre, Spiritual Well Being

The covert bassist

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The Covert Bassist

So. I’ve been learning to pay the bass – for about eight months. No amp. No teacher. Just reading the books and the notes and learning. She is home now. Home from six months of backpacking and back country rangering and so the dance of living in a music house begins again.

I wait until she goes off to noontime martial arts class before I practice my vocal exercises because I don’t want to scream her ears off and I am trying to break through that barrier, to give it more, to be a better, stronger vocalist than I have ever been before. I play piano in the evenings. Often with the door ajar. Piano I have under my belt so it is a good thing to share with the neighbors; not so my siren wailing. Once the door is closed, I woodshed on the guitar. Anytime of day I can play the bass because I don’t have an amp. So really, I can’t play the bass when someone else – like the off-season ranger – is playing mandolin and singing at performance pitch. Actually, who would want to practice bass anyway when you can listen to such heartfelt and talented protest folk tunes coming from the other room. 

Let’s rethink that. Who wouldn’t want to play along to such anthems? Mandolin. Voice. The only logical complement to the sound is bass. Preferably upright bass. But here I am – the mom in the other room with a horizontal bass and no amp. An aspiring bassist who can’t help but move toward the music. So, I head to the kitchen. Two walls and the thickness of a closet between us. 

When she plays, I play. When she falls silent, I fall silent. But I am cloistered around the corner in the kitchen and she doesn’t even know I am there. When she stops to ferret out the next gem of a lyric, I hold my peace. I look around the kitchen to see what is at hand to occupy my time. Sadly, what is at hand is carob chips, a cask of peanut butter, bags of corn chips, a plethora of natural snacks. I’m going to have to move to the other room and confess before I gain 20 pounds. While there’s not too much unusual or interesting about a mom hiding in the pantry and eating herself into obesity; and there may be a little something romantic about a covert bassist; it’s probably time to come out of the closet. I’ve ordered an amp. That way I can plug in the headphones and no one will ever know.

Emotional Health, Family, Music and Theatre, Musical resolutions

Music knows no age or genre

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I was working on recording a Father’s Day offering for my dad so I pounded away at the keyboard all morning trying to get the nuances of the old-fashioned gospel hymn just right. It must be relentlessly taxing on my roommate in such situations, I thought. After all, she is much younger than I, and an educated and trained musician in her own right.

Somewhat wryly I smiled, “Old church music! If they only knew; sounds like ragtime straight out of a barroom, doesn’t it?”

“It’s perfect,” she said, surprising me with her reply. I had forgotten she is an anthropologist. “It was upbeat, stylish, action-packed, bouncy, full of energy – just what every generation wants from their music.”

True music is ageless and knows no genre. It is us – the linear generations- that place restrictions and prejudices; we who say, “that’s folk, that’s classical, that’s religious, I don’t do old stuff.” Ridiculous! Music always and forever will be an outcropping of the soul. It may be a mathematical formula or a stream of consciousness; an opera or a rap; but first and foremost it is spiritual – an outward expression of what is within.

 Meanwhile, I continue to chip away at a larger project: Mom’s memorial service. We want to do it right. It was she from whom we got the music. It needs to be upbeat, stylish, full of energy. And of course, it will be very mid-century Christian. I debated aloud about assigning my younger son a part. All my children are musicians but the youngest is the one who parleys in the hardened vocabulary and angst of his generation on punk stages and in dusky bars four nights a week. Would he stoop to old-fashioned gospel? Sadly, I was projecting the embarrassment and rebellion of my own young adult years on him.

“Phil is not like that,” she said. He is not a snob. He loves Music. “Music is music with him.” Music is an outward expression of what is within. There is an ocean of love in that young man – whether pain or joy.

How fortunate we are – every one of us in this family – to have music as the go to pressure valve – the way to express what is really inside – to say what can’t be put in words.

What do you need to say through music today? What do you need to hear?

Character, Emotional Health, Health and Long Life, Metaphor, Music and Theatre, Musical resolutions, Uncategorized

The Naked Vocalist, aka Grandma Godiva

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She took a class. Because she is a life-long learner. Originally, she wanted to learn how to record and edit virtual choir. It seemed like a logical next step for one who has sung in choirs, worked in studios, directed voices young and old, recorded original song demos and cut rehearsal tracks. Like the model who becomes the photographer or the ingenué actress turned aging producer, it was the next step. She followed up. Signed up. There was no class available for the engineering of the thing. But participation often lays the groundwork of understanding, so she was game.
What you must know is, she is not a diva. She is not one of those luscious voiced, coloratura soloist girls. No, this is the girl who prides herself on being a most excellent second fiddle. She loves to sing harmony, and she is actually very good at it. She needs others. She can be the backbone, the support, and keep 40 other voices on pitch if necessary – but she rarely stands alone. She loves singing shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow with other vocalists. She loves leaning in and hearing the harmonies and blend. But pandemics require distance. And pandemics are also great incubators for virtual choirs.

She reads notes. She has paid her dues, honed her skills, and gently exercised her voice back to what it used to be before 60 – or so she thinks. Like the good girl she has always been, she does her homework. But this week’s homework was to record an audio cut, raw, straight, with no effects – just her part – one voice out of eight, naked, exposed.

Don’t get me wrong. She’s not a microphone or smart phone virgin. It’s not like she has never sung before. But always with her clothes on, so to speak. In fact, the thing she loves about the recording studio is the way her voice sounds when the engineer works with it. She can land a spot-on tone, and then she lets the engineer dress it.

So there she was, Grandma Godiva (her long, long hair, falling down about her knees), her voice perfectly naked, exposed for the world to hear. The engineer will gild the lily later. Attach and press send was the most humbling thing she has done in a long time. Truth be known, she’s always been a little insecure about the things she loves most.

Naked. That’s pretty much how it feels to be single sometimes, or standing alone – the only one raising a voice about any given issue. So here’s to you, all you naked vocalists. Be strong. Be brave. I don’t care if you are 30 and single or 65 and alone. Dare Greatly. Don’t quit on your music – whatever it is that makes your heart sing.

Sometimes you’ve got to go it alone – naked. And pandemic is one of those times.

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Character, Home and Hearth, Music and Theatre, Neighborhood

The Perils of Improvisation

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She came up on the patio porch about 7:00 last evening while Andrea and I were woodshedding Wayfaring Stranger; Andrea leading on mandolin and I, fumbling along on guitar – my second or third or fourth axe. It was a warm evening and neighborhood doors and windows were open. She cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed up against the screen door, peering in like a snorkeler ready to dive.

“Is that you smokin’ weed?” she asked – and laughed. She knew the answer. No one smokes inside. A few moments earlier I had detected a sniff of the same pernicious flora wafting in from the sidewalk and wrinkled up my nose. Andrea laughed at me and said, “If you’re going to do concerts, get used to it.”

Now the shadow snorkeler at the door continued, “Thanks for praying for us. It really helped.”

Neighbors are close and noisy, walls are very thin, my daughter is very vocal and active in her faith. She reaches out to the neighbors the second she is prompted. I am the quiet one, shy, and frankly, it’s not in my personality to say everything I believe or philosophize. No. I take my feelings directly to the piano. Sometimes, I am so timid I close the door.

“We sing along with the piano,” she continued. “My family knows most of the words to the old hymns.”

My Elvis and pop-folk to hymn ratio is about eight to one. Perhaps my neighbor perceives the hymn value in Love me Tender, Can’t Help Falling in Love, and Danny Boy. Or maybe it’s You Raise Me Up or Water is Wide – those often masquerade as hymns.

Andrea and I rounded out the second verse of Wayfaring Stranger and paused. The neighbor added, “But sometimes we are singing along with the hymns and the piano just goes da da da off to a different tune all together.” She made a spiraling motion with her finger. I laughed out loud, “That,” I said, “is the peril of improvisation.” Next thing you know she’ll be complaining that she can’t reach the high notes and I’ll have to move Unchained Melody out of the key of “C.”

“Can you do Amazing Grace in “A”? I asked Andrea as I strummed a I, IV, V. This one’s for the hymn loving lady on the porch. Andrea lead. I followed. We eased into a rhythm. The lady’s live-in came out their door. She pulled him into a hug. And they danced. Yes, they danced with Amazing Grace on our patio and then moved off down the sidewalk.

And that is why we make music  – why we improvise – so people can still sing and dance.

Family, Health and Long Life, Home and Hearth, Music and Theatre

In A Music House

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I have been long gone from the music house I grew up in – the house where my dad bought my mother musical instruments and paid for our weekly lessons – but when I visit, Dad will frequently ask for those old hymns. Time was, my mother and I would play duets. Duets happened less and less frequently this past decade as arthritis, knee surgery and the pain of old age exacted a toll on Mom. However, in July of 2018, when I paid a regular visit home and sat down at the well-used piano, Mom surprised us by maneuvering her walker to the vibraharp, picking up the mallets and joining in. Bent and gnarled, she was nearly leaning on the tone plates. After three tunes, she was fatigued – so she sat – on the organ bench – and played a medley. Thankfully, I had presence of mind to whip out my cellphone. Mom didn’t know she was being recorded. Please look past my shoulder and beyond my attempts to accompany by ear and enjoy an 85-year-old woman who didn’t quit on her music – or the old tunes.

Mansion Over the Hilltop

It Is No Secret

When We All Get to Heaven / At the Cross

My youngest son came to visit. This in itself was a grand occasion. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh for 16 months – though we do have the advantage of Duo Video calls and Instagram. We hiked. We ate. We talked. The kids pulled out the mandolin and guitar and I sat on the piano stool and luxuriated.

Andrea Shellabarger, mandolin, Philip Shellabarger, guitar, May 10, 2020
Andrea Shellabarger, mandolin, Philip Shellabarger, guitar, May 10, 2020

Soon I exclaimed, “Oh! It is wonderful to live in a music house!”

My 31-year-old daughter looked at me blankly, “But Mom, we have always lived in a music house.” Now that she mentions it, this is true for her – and for her brother(s). She grew up in a home where the acoustic piano was in use not only for family pleasure, but for the teaching of countless piano students. Frequently, both guitar and piano rehearsed together for the occasional music and worship gig. I taxied them to marching band and chorale rehearsals and performances. And yes, I treasure the memory of the night I sat down at the piano to relax and my pre-teen son crawled under the bench, curled up against the piano, basked in the vibration of the strings. Even when the kids flew the nest and moved out on their own, housing was with other band members – in the rehearsal house. Music was expected. Rehearsal required.

My daughter holds the lease now and I am the roommate in my current domicile for an indefinite period of time. I got the blank look again the other day when I expressed my reticence to embark on vocal exercises with neighbors so close or to play the piano and practice guitar while she reads and writes in the adjoining room.

“Mom,” she remonstrated, “when I lived with the band it was expected you practice your instrument two hours a day in addition to band rehearsals. When everyone plays more than one instrument and practices two hours a day, the projects are going to overlap. Get used to it.”

Sheesh, and I feel like I am encroaching when I woodshed for a few minutes, play piano for an hour, practice guitar 30 minutes and try to wrangle the bass for fifteen.

Yes, my children have always lived in a music house. Their roommates have been fellow band members.

Thank goodness they have never known the poverty of living with roommates who have a television running every waking moment and who, rather than cooperating to schedule times of silence for piano practice, simply turn the volume up to hear the telly over the piano.

It was not like that in the house I grew up in. When I was growing up, many years we didn’t even have a television – and the times we did, it was never allowed on Sunday. Instead of television, we practiced our instruments. And on Sundays, we played hymns.