The World According to Ms. Alison

I love words, and one of my all time favourite things is to stumble across a new one.  "Anthropomorphism" was a hit when I was about 8.  "Intussusception" is still an epic inspiration.  And Ms. Alison's word for today?  "Amusia".

"Amusia" refers to the inability to not just produce a specific pitch, but to be able to distinguish pitch at all.  To an amusiac,  music itself is unpleasant noise.  Which I find hilarious because to my ears a great deal of what is currently passed off as "music" is excruciatingly unpleasant noise with way too much woof in the subwoofer and much too much auto in the autotuning.  No exaggeration, it physically hurts.

Anyway, a new parent informed me today that her belief is, as no less an authority than Simon Cowell of American Idol has informed us, "either you can sing, or you can't (and if you can't you suck)".  Upon reflection I suppose I was expected to enthuse that yes, her four year old is profoundly gifted because he can approximate the general area surrounding a pitch, and therefore does not suck.  However it didn't even occur to me, as I have never met anyone who could not be hoodwinked into singing basically in tune within a comfortable vocal range.  Like maybe "Happy Birthday" without the high note.

She got a bit belligerent though, and even I started to question my audacious conclusions, based as they are upon a graduate degree in vocal pedagogy and thousands of hours of actual experience with actual people with actual voices.  So I googled the question, as one does, and, hooray!  discovered today's awesome new word.  I learned that it is true that about 4% of the population are really and truly congenitally amusical:  it is classified as a form of learning disorder, unrelated to intelligence, but with some relation to certain modes of memory and other higher functions. Structurally there are close parallels to the divergences found in the brains of those with dyslexia and epilepsy.  Acquired amusia is a fairly common short term effect of strokes in specific brain areas, and, in some cases, lesions lead to permanent incapacities.

I really hope I get to run into someone amusical one day.  It would be very interesting to learn about their world.  Apart from anything else we could conduct cool experiments measuring our relative pain thresholds listening to Justin Bieber. 

I can't wait for the next time someone claims they would just love to sing but can't because they are totally tone deaf, etc.  The probability of this being literally true is exactly zero percent.  If they were one of the 4% of true amusiacs, music itself would be such an unpleasant experience they would have no desire to sing anyway.  If they lacked the vocal co-ordination to sing, they wouldn't have enough voice to be complaining about their presumed lack of ability.

Life is too short to convince yourself you have nothing to sing worth hearing, after all.
 

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I suppose I've been a musician so long that I totally take for granted one of the most wonderful things about music:  music friends. Aside from the probably unfortunate fact that musicians tend to inbreed for one reason or another (will no one else put up with us?), this evening I couldn't help but realize that almost all the friends I have made and kept over the last 32 years are people I have performed with in one capacity or another, starting with my very first musical in primary school.  

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Another September, another crop of fresh young minds to subject to my pedagogical experiments.  So far, so good:  everyone has accomplished not only the laudable feat of not forgetting anything, but more to the point have figured out some new things for themselves.  Yes, dear reader, there has been much voluntary composing and general playing of the piano in my absence.  This warms the cockles of my piano teacher heart in ways that almost compensate for the sad reality that piano teachers do not in fact get paid over the summer months while their students are off frolicking on vacation. 

Which brings me to the delicate subject of tuition fees.  Most parents appreciate the massive bang for their buck they receive for $60/hour.  However there is always at least one newcomer who, with varying degrees of subtlety (or not), questions why exactly it is I charge what I do This is a question with many social and personal ramifications for many, many future blogs. 

For now, let it just be noted that I have been studying and practicing my craft for 32 of my 38 years.  I choose to be a teacher because it is my vocation, and I do not begrudge a cent of it.  However:  there is no health insurance, paid vacation or sick days, retirement schemes, etc.  There is barely even a union and there certainly isn't any enforced trade wage. 

Because pretty much all my students go to school, my billable hours are a whopping 4 hours a day, and because they have a school vacation calendar, full time teaching is limited to 9-10 months of the year.  $60/hour really doesn't go very far.

If you keep in mind that music schools do of course take at least a 50% cut, those teachers who work for them are making half as much with the same restrictions of billable hours and lack of benefits.  Almost every professional musician I know is extremely intelligent and could be a doctor or a lawyer or a baker or a candlestick maker if they so chose.  However, we are musicians, and your money is paying for what money can't actually buy:  talent.

We are more than happy to share it.  That is what we do.  But please be aware that it is at a personal cost that $60/hour cannot even begin to approximate.

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