I have three children, a son (currently 6) and twin girls (3-and-a-half). More precisely, identical twin girls. Split from the same zygote, they have the same DNA. And yet, they are utterly different people. From the first hours of their lives, we began to notice differences. B wanted to cuddle up with her sister. E wanted to finally get some space to herself. One slept easily and beautifully from day one, the other needed a lot of cuddling and reassurance before she would sleep, and she always (always) wakes up first whether from nap or bedtime. The lifetime hours of sleep she has robbed from her sister would be an amazing number.

In this, their third year, we have noticed something remarkable. B is in many respects exactly like our son. More like him in fact than her genetic replica and constant companion since birth. She has his personality, the same hangups about how things are done, the same sleep struggles. Just like him, every button on a shirt must be fastened and every zipper pulled all the way to the top. They will both only pee in one bathroom, and only poop in the other. They play together beautifully, both wanting to run around and crash into things while our other daughter plays dolls or house or dress-up.

Children are such a wonder. They are born and you think you know everything about them. A few years later, and you just watch in awe at all the things contained in these mysterious little people.

If you are someone, like me, who reads books about music, I have a very important piece of advice.

In musician and composer biographies, memoirs, retrospectives, etc., many authors, perhaps jealous of the kinds of affects music is capable of, spend many pages describing music. Lengthy descriptions, colorful language, the most adjectival adjectives. I can think of several culprits, but the worst is Jan Swafford. Of the 848 pages of his Mozart: The Reign of Love (a magnificent biography by every other measure) I would estimate 200 pages are dedicated to descriptions of operas. So many pages that he runs out of words to describe them; at least three opera plots are described as possessing “various contretemps”. (I haven’t read his Charles Ives biography but I can only imagine how his thesaurus felt after that one was finished.)

Here’s the advice: when an author begins describing a piece of music, stop reading. Go listen to the music. Skip the description and carry on. You will be much the better for it.

I’ve taught a lot of guitar lessons over the years. I stopped counting at 10,000, and that was quite a while ago. This means I’ve taught hundreds of students. When it was my main source of income (basically all of my 20s) I was not in a financial position to be picky about who I taught, so I saw all kinds. After a while you notice a pattern, a typology that recapitulates every few students. Here are some of the folks that come through your studio:

The six-year old with type-A parents

You are a substitute for piano lessons. Piano lessons, of course, are a vehicle for pressure-testing the hopes and dreams of the parents. Well-heeled families approach their children’s education with the intensity of Wall Street floor traders. Any day could be ruinous for future prosperity.

The mother almost always brings the student to lessons. (The father, one imagines, is too busy closing deals that use esoteric financial instruments to raise your rent thirty percent in exchange for providing munitions to jihadists.) You can spot her from across the parking lot, deeply tanned with fresh highlights glimmering as she descends an SUV the size of your first apartment. A few of these students do very well. The rest are crushed by great expectations. Maybe a lacrosse scholarship is in their future.

The wannabe rocker

Catchphrase: “It can’t be taught, you have to feel it.” A curious opinion for someone forking out $75/hour to be taught whatever it is. This person has probably played more air guitar than you played actual guitar. The scourge of record-store owners since their teenage years, they have complete scorn for all things technique. “You think Stevie Ray Vaughan practiced scales?! He was just rocking for hours a day.” Suggesting that if hours a day were being spent on the guitar in this circumstance we could expect some real progress leads to a change of subject. The least painful way of spending this half hour is usually chatting about favorite records.

Some wannabe rockers actually play the guitar, but not well enough to make a career at it. They often become music store teachers with the catchphrase, “It can’t be taught, you have to feel it.

The child of the wannabe rocker

A variation of the wannabe rocker is the dad (always a dad) who understands his opportunity has passed. This of course means the frustrated dream must be laid upon the child, like a student loan that transfers to your family when you die. “Did you guys rock today?! 🤘” he always asks at pickup.

When I’m asked this question I understand how Europeans feel when Americans ask “What’s up?” I take the same tack and do not answer. In most cases the answer is, “your offspring cannot play a single chord after six months, but you always pay your bill on time and I need the money so I’m going to smile and give a polite chuckle before giving another reminder of the necessity of daily practice time.”

The wildly optimistic adult

Many students come to the guitar for the first time as adults. These tend to show up in January, but sometimes following significant milestones. A birthday ending in a -0, for example, or perhaps retirement or even divorce. Something has lit the fire that it is time to learn this thing they have always wanted to do. Retirees have the advantage of time on their hands. Though their brains are not as elastic, they can actually spend time on it and do well. It’s the high-achieving, mid-career, president of the HOA, marathon running, community volunteer, father of five who really overestimates how well this will go. “With all those responsibilities how much do you expect you’ll be able practice?” I always ask. “Oh, an hour a day or so, maybe more on the weekends.” “The weekends when you run 10 miles, coach all of your kids’ soccer teams, and deliver food to shut-ins before teaching Sunday school?”

They’ve been good at everything they have ever done, so when the guitar doesn’t take they usually turn to something else quickly. Perhaps starting another nonprofit or digging a well in the third world. Something manageable.

The wildly pessimistic adult

This person, despite having a career and devoted family, insists they have never been good at anything and will probably not be good at this either. “Really struggled this week.” “Not getting anywhere on this thing.” “I’m sorry to make you listen to this.”

The funny thing is, these students often make very good progress, but they never believe that.

The theorist

A typical adult male specimen. The student who cannot play worth beans, but has many theories about the guitar and playing it effectively. Theories that are, of course, untested, since he cannot play. But he was reading an interesting post in a forum last week about the geometry of wrist angles and attack velocity. He usually has significant opinions about the construction of guitars and various tone woods. Don’t get him started on rounded versus straight nail profiles. The luthier-built guitar he has sounds great…in theory. But since, alas, all that wrist geometry is purely theoretical we might never know. Perhaps when he has finished trying every guitar string currently in manufacture it will sound better. For 9-12 months, he will challenge all of the advice you offer, will not practice, and will eventually move on to try his theories on another teacher.

The Switfies / Smithies

There is a pretty consistent breakdown among the teenage girls who take guitar lessons. 30% are alt, angsty teens who listen to The Smiths and would like to play The Smiths. Black nail polish, thrifted Dark Side of the Moon t-shirts, Doc Martens. They don’t fit in at school and you are always slightly worried about them. The other 70% are buoyant Taylor Swift fans, whose piety has led them to take up the guitar itself as an act of devotion. After learning a few songs, the bright ones notice that they all used the same four chords. For those not truly devoted to the genius of Taylor Swift, the bubble will burst. Knowing that all of her songs use the same chord progressions, the same structure, and are basically all the same will disabuse them of the illusion that she is a brilliant musician. For the truly devout though, it will only confirm everything. “Only a true genius could make so many amazing songs out of the same four chords!”

The human heart is a wonder.

Every fall I visit the 3rd grade class of a friend who teaches elementary music. I play some guitar music and talk about it, but mostly I answer their questions. They ask the most amazing questions.

A sampling from my last few visits:

“Why is the guitar shaped like that?”

“Why does the guitar have six strings? Could it have more?”

“Are there guitars that are really big or really small?”

“Why does it sound that way?”

“Who invented the guitar?”

“Who invented music?”

“Why do different instruments sound different ways?”

“What’s your favorite thing about the guitar?”

“How long does it take to get really good at the guitar?”

“How do you make it sound like two instruments at the same time?”

Not yet burdened with the imaginary shame of not knowing things, they ask these with utter sincerity because they want to know the answer. We would do well to follow their example.

Though I have spoken of it often throughout my life, I realized I have never written down my memories of 9/11 and the following days. Here’s how I remember it.

In the fall of 2001 I was ten years old. A Tuesday near the beginning of the school year should have been like any other. Our homeschool routine was to have “together time” first thing, though not early. A family of night owls, our school day began around 9 with readalouds, vocabulary words, history, and memory work (scripture and poems) then we would all go to our individual work for the rest of the morning.

This Tuesday was slightly unusual in that my parents were both out of town in Denver, 1600 miles away. My sister-in-law—my oldest brother’s wife—and my nine-month-old nephew were staying with us. There were four kids living at home at the time. My sister almost seventeen, my next older brother thirteen, me, and my younger brother about to turn seven. Another brother was off at college, and the oldest married with his first child living in town (and in our house that week).

We were in the living room reading when the house phone rang. House phones, of course, were still the primary means of communicating with anyone outside the home and were always answered when they rang. That was the last normal thing that would happen for a long time.

Whoever answered it came back quickly, “Turn on the TV, there was a plane crash!” We were not in the habit of turning on the television during the day, I couldn’t imagine why this was worthy of interrupting school. “A plane crash” did nothing to prepare us for the image that greeted us on the screen, one that everyone in the world was watching at that moment.

In Denver, my father had just been heading downstairs for his first meeting of the day. A lady in the elevator asked where he was going like it was shocking anyone was going anywhere. “To my meeting,” he offered. “It’ll be cancelled, go back to your room and watch the news.” She must have been convincing, he went back and found my mom glued to the tv having just heard herself.

A few years ago reminiscing about this day someone said, “Can you imagine if there had been twitter on that day?” This thought chilled me. How different would the national experience have been if everyone were getting their news piecemeal, unverified, conspiracy-laden from the start? The days and weeks of potent unity we remember so vividly may not have happened.

My parents soon called the house, “We’re coming home. It will take a few days, we think we’ll have to drive.” They were certainly not going to wait around to see how long air travel would be grounded—they knew they had to get home. Even driving turned out to be difficult. Every rental car in Denver was claimed immediately. Even the U-Haul store was cleaned out. Eventually they sat in the waiting room of a rental agency waiting for a car to be returned before starting the 24-hour drive home. Once on the road they didn’t stop, taking turns driving and napping, talking with complete strangers at every gas stop along Interstate 70. Everyone was on their way home.

My main memory of the day itself is visceral. A knot my stomach had never made before. Of all the ages I could have been, ten was a very tender one. Old enough to understand something world-changing had happened, not old enough to understand what that might mean. My teenage siblings were theorizing about terrorists and retaliatory actions, my little brother not quite old enough to really get it. I was filled with dread and my parents weren’t home.

Pretty quickly I dismissed myself and went upstairs to do anything else away from the TV. I was up there when the second plane hit. “Come back downstairs, we’re watching history!” I much preferred reading about the Fertile Crescent in Story of the World than watching it unfold 150 miles away.

Though not as significant a part of our cultural memory, the other two crashes, into the Pentagon and Flight 93 heroically brought down by passengers in Pennsylvania, gave the day a sense of unending disaster. We were all watching the news as it broke, one plane after the next. After four crashes why not more? When would it end? If you drew a triangle with points on NYC, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, we lived right in that triangle. It felt incredibly close. It was very close. Traveling at airliner speed another fifteen minutes in the air could have put it in our county.

Then the first tower fell.

At some point we realized lunchtime had come and gone. My sister made a package of ramen noodles, giving me a bowl of mostly broth saying, “We’ll have to get used to having less food now.” She meant it as a joke but at the time I thought she was serious. The idea of a land war in North America seemed completely possible to me. “We are under attack” was a phrase used all day long on the news. My sister and I laughed about this years later, she had no memory of it at all.

My parents made it back by Wednesday night, but nothing was normal for a while. In fact, nothing ever returned to how it was before. There is a lot of nostalgia right now about the 90’s. Everyone wants their kids to have a “90s summer” or “90s childhood.” They are mostly taking about technology and screens when they say this, but a world without a 9/11 is a different world. One less frightening, where danger is farther off and home a safer place.

There’s a scrappy muscadine vine that grows between my neighbor’s yard and mine. It doesn’t make much fruit (some years none at all), but when the grapes are ripe eating them is a ritual of memory. The only other place I’ve ever eaten a muscadine was my grandfather’s farm, and they never fail to bring back memories of days spent there. Some of the best days of my life. Today was the day to taste some of those memories again. The muscadines are like Ray Bradbury’s jars of dandelion wine holding the memories of each Green Town summer past.

The brain scientists tell us that taste and memory are connected because they are processed near one another in the brain. This answer is profoundly uninteresting. The psalmist tells us to “taste and see.” Flavor and vision put together. “Take and eat, this is my body,” invites us to the table of the Lord. Food is somehow the thing itself, and also the symbol of so much more. I don’t pretend to fully understand the mystery, but when I taste the muscadine I know something true and profound I don’t know any other way.

In my lifetime there have been two public figures who made their public lives about kindness and uniting people: Fred Rogers and Dolly Parton. Both gone now, with no viable candidates to replace them.

Mr. Rogers made his life about service, kindness, and attention. When he hosted guests on his show (generally chosen because of their marginal status) the thing that is most impressive is the intensity of attention he bestows on everyone. The kind of attention many people can go their whole lives without receiving. Attention like this is so rare. Those who receive it from him seem to glow. They become the best version of themselves as he watches.

When he received a lifetime achievement award and had the chance to give a speech to the best and brightest of show business, he did two things with the opportunity. First was the gentlest reminder that being in entertainment, just like ministry, which he was ordained into as well, should be a life of service. The calling is to improve the lives of others. The second thing he did was remind everyone they had helpers (”look for the helpers,” as he taught us on his show). He asks them to take a moment of quiet to think about the people who helped them succeed. “I’ll keep the time.” In seconds, the camera pans across eyes filled with tears across the room. At an event where the most famous people in the world gather to congratulate themselves on their success, a mild-mannered puppeteer found a way to utterly reorient the values in the room in just a few moments. You could imagine a similar scene if Jesus showed up in the War Room.

Though her life was certainly more glamorous than Mr. Rogers’s, Dolly Parton demonstrated the same ability to pay attention to those around here. There are so many stories of her kindness to studio crews, cameramen, and particularly musicians. She always had time to speak with everyone and see them where they were. Like Mr. Rogers, she always remembered her helpers. When Porter Wagner fell on hard times later in life, Dolly purchased the rights to his back catalogue and gave them to him as a gift. He had taken advantage of her in a vulnerable moment in her early career, but she chose to remember that he had gotten her started in show business and taught her to succeed.

Her secretive philanthropic work has slowly gotten out over the years. It’s notable for the local focus. She helped nearly anyone, but in particular she helped the people where she was from. She is probably the most locally rooted of any celebrity, always keeping a connection where she grew up and investing heavily in the area. Paying attention to its needs and challenges was part of this. So many people in her position insulate themselves from real life and the people around them, but she was always of the people.

And whatever else she might have done, she never forgot that songs are what bring people together. In a clip I saw this week, she was asked about the song in a time capsule at Dollywood to be opened in 2045. She said why she had done it (”It’s a very good song!”) and how there were included instructions for how to play a CD in case everyone had forgotten by then. “How do you think people will react when they hear the song in 2045?” the host asks. “Well, I hope you like my song.”

Over the last few years I’ve developed an exercise to help make purchasing decisions. It is quite easy and in general is very effective.

Here it is: picture you are at the end of your life. One last thing you have to do before you enter the next is look at the pile of trash you generated during your lifetime. Imagine the things you would see! Some good things like childhood toys, mementos, that pair of jeans that fit just perfectly but you finally wore out beyond repair. The shoes you’re wearing in every picture of you from college. You will be happy to see these again. They added something to your life.

Then there’s the real garbage. The stuff that was halfway to the trash when you bought it. The cheapo utensils. The paper plates. The fast fashion clothes. The toaster with an LED screen that doesn’t get hot enough to burn you. Thirty or forty smart phones full of gold and cobalt that cannot be repaired once broken. Thirty non-stick pans that each lasted about two years. These are the things you will be filled with dread upon seeing. It’s embarrassing to go through so much garbage in a single life. This pile contains so much plastic.

Looking closely, you might notice there are some things conspicuously missing from the pile. Your cast iron skillet is being used by someone else back on earth. Your guitar(s) have passed on to your son who has taken it up. Your father’s watch is still ticking, or at least kept on a dresser as a memento. The vintage Stanley planes you collected and used in the woodshed [my 2nd person ruse is breaking down here] were already a hundred years old when you got them. They easily have another century in them. The good kitchen knives you got for a wedding present just need sharpened up and they are ready to go for at least another lifetime. On it goes. Some of the things you used the most have not worn out.

So before you buy something just ask: do I really want to see this on the garbage pile of my life?

Fair warning: this is an angry rant full of righteous indignation. I live with many inconsistencies but one thing I have never wavered on is that using AI for recreation is morally indefensible. The costs are astronomical, and usually distant from us. That cost got a lot closer to me today.

My oldest brother was the first person in my family to start reading Wendell Berry about twenty years ago. But unlike most people who read him, are compelled by his message, and then continue living roughly the same way, he changed nearly everything about his life. It began where he was, a house in town, planting out every available piece of the yard with vegetables. Soon he was gardening several lots in the neighborhood and selling at a farmer’s market.

After doing this for several years he was able to move to an actual farm that had been neglected for many years. He has spent the last ten years doing the exhausting work of reclaiming the land, building infrastructure, and restoring the health of the soil. It’s not a hobby farm, and it’s most definitely not a vanity influencer farm. It’s dirty, a work-in-progress everywhere you look, and a completely beautiful and healthful place. It has never supported him financially but he’s worked harder at this farm than most people ever work at anything. If you visit for dinner most of the things on your plate will have lived or grown within sight of the porch.

I just found out that land on two sides of the farm have been purchased at astronomical sums to house data centers. If this goes through instead of looking out the front door and bay windows on pasture and the neighboring farms, it will be a view of a disgusting gray box emitting a 60 decibel hum twenty-four hours a day and clogging the air with diesel exhaust every time they switch to backup power. Perhaps the wells that water the livestock and provide their house water will dry up or become too contaminated to drink. What will they do then?

Despite the significant urbanization and suburbanization of America in the last decades, tens of millions of Americans still prefer to live in the country. Places where they can look out over land and trees and grass. Where animals live freely or are cultivated. Where there is some quiet and you can count on the “day-blind stars waiting with their light” to come out soon. A place where the stars aren’t completed blotted out by light.

But for everyone else, there is such pressing need for data computation. Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t know what Donald Trump Jesus would have looked like. We couldn’t create fake versions of loved one’s voices to scam grandmothers out of their life savings without these vital calls. Who will make all these robocalls? People? The indignity. We couldn’t surveil our citizens going about their days with flock cameras, or permanently save the footage of everyone who appears on our ring cameras. What would we do without these data centers? Do we expect corporations to employ humans (with their expectations of salary and benefits) to do their work? There would be no slop to post to Facebook, no way to adjust our faces and bodies so they look their best when we post our selfies and gym mirror shots. Someone must pay the cost for these essentials, and that someone is a family in Pennsylvania trying to live their life on a little bit of land.

On the upside, most of these data centers will be abandoned soon. Once the venture capital poker game goes south and servicing the debt becomes un-actuarial, this gray box will stop emitting its 60 decibel hum. What a relief. Then all we are left with is an abandoned building, forever rotting where there could be a family living, perhaps with a kitchen garden and some chickens. Wasting their time mucking about in the dirt when they should be indoors ”making music” with Suno and having ChatGPT do their homework. What fools.

This rotting gray box will never disappear. The people who build it won’t come dismantle it and restore the land. They will just leave, hoping their balance sheets don’t suffer too much and relieved at the depreciation they can write off. The box will not die, it will just decay creating more poison in the soil with each passing year. Because we couldn’t write our own books, paint our own paintings, think about a problem and come up with a solution. We can’t sit in the shade of a tree playing a cheap guitar to pass an afternoon. We cannot just be men and women. We must be super-people, aware of everything, informed and outraged, deceived by the fakes, laughing at the slop, and too stimulated to count the cost.

The ever-incisive Hollis Robbins* (personal story about Hollis in the footnote)—one of the great critics of higher ed in the AI age—has a recent piece about what she calls the Wordcels versus Shape Rotators debate. These terms were new to me but the debate is recognizable. In Robbins’s telling, there has been debate among literate people since Aristotle about the social standing of those who design and build. It was not settled that citizenship should be granted to the artisanal classes, and this dichotomy has created cultural divisions ever since. I’ve spent enough time around working-class folks (basically everyone I grew up around outside my family) to know that those who work physically have the same reservations about people who diddle with words and numbers for a living. But of course, they tend to voice those doubts in conversations, not writing, so they don’t get recorded in textual history. Only the things they make are left as a testament to their contribution. You know, bridges, skyscrapers, electrical grids, aqueducts, pyramids. Just stuff. It seems to be quite easy for word people (let’s stop calling everything a -cel) to ignore the contributions of stuff people, even while they enjoy the conveniences of the built environment. Every time you flush away your waste and don’t get dysentery you should remember Alexander Cummings. I don’t have the slightest idea who built my house in 1959—and probably couldn’t find out even if I tried—but they did some fine work I live in.

With some exceptions, history tends to focus on those who left behind words. The names of the designers and builders of every ancient wonder are lost to us. The kings who commissioned them are the ones preserved. Tourists though tend to focus on the world of shapes. We don’t travel the world to read documents, we go to see the things left behind.

(An aside I’ll try not get distracted by is that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both adept in each of these worlds. Powerful writers and rhetoricians who were inventors and systems thinkers as well. Early America, cast largely in their mold, was both highly literate and physically industrious. The respectability of the working class citizen was something European visitors frequently commented on. It seems you need both of these things for a functioning democracy.)

You are probably thinking, like I was, of how you fit into this. I’m a professor, a reader, and hobbyist writer. My professional life is largely a verbal affair. But I’m a musician, I love to make things with my hands, and I can in fact move shapes around in my mind. I discovered this installing drywall with my dad when I was a kid. He was marking a piece to cut and I realized it was going to be backwards when flipped around to the wall. His knowing look told me I had done something impressive. (He could also do this of course, he had just made a mistake. He’s among the most highly-trained of shape rotators, a head and neck surgeon.) Geometry and trigonometry were the only math subjects I comprehended.

For many of these activities it’s obvious to me which category they go into. Reading and writing: words. Woodworking and home projects: shapes. But what about music?

Is music a word or a shape?

Of course it’s really another thing altogether. Music is sound, that most undervalued of sensory information. Other than getting a song in your head, most of us don’t think in non-linguistic sound very often. Thought is generally done in the medium of language or space. Constructing sentences, or imagining objects. Thinking in sound in a structured way is the province of musicians. Moving from sound we hear to a structured system is where this topic applies.

Classical musicians love to make music intelligible. Most of what we teach as music theory is just naming common patterns so they can be discussed and recognized. We do this with common sounds (chords and scales), rhythmic organization (meters), and patterns of change and repetition across pieces (forms). We love to know what something is. This knowledge often does very little to explain the aesthetic experience of the music itself, but at least we have some labels.

Music notation goes a step further to turn music into a symbolic system like writing. From a wash of sound rises a set of signifiers that are named and described. This is no less shocking a development than turning spoken language into writing, crossing a profound threshold from temporally organized sound to frozen representation.

Symbols are helpful, but the experience of music is really spatiality rooted. We describe the high and lowness of sounds or the “speed” of tempo. We experience music in its own space that is not physical space, but resembles it in its mechanics of movement, weight, and repose. Music lets you dance while sitting still. This explains why a set of labels for musical phenomena are not required, or even particularly important, to have a meaningful experience. The spatial and temporal elements are unavoidable, even if they are imprecise in our perception. (My thoughts on this are greatly informed by the discussion of linguistic metaphors for language in Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music.)

Other than high and low however, we have a dearth of terminology to describe musical shapes and patterns. Outside of technical labels, we are left with very few terms for melodic shape and texture, much less things like timbre. Check the glossary of a theory textbook and you might not find a single term that describes the shape of a melody, even though these things do fall into some pretty standard patterns. Even the concept of a shape is fraught, since we can only assemble these “shapes” reflectively in the imagination. They do not appear before us in a single moment like a sculpture or painting.

Perhaps the language of dance would be a more useful set of metaphors. Gesture describes music much better. A way of moving through time in sound space, rather than physical space. Now we’re compelled to add a third category. Words, shapes, and gestures. Any medium that extends through time must have a way of describing it that includes forms of movement observed sequentially.

If building the coliseum doesn’t earn your citizenship, making gestures will do it even less so. We have only descriptive accounts of every dancer and musician until the roughly simultaneous invention of video and sound recording. Every artistic gesture made in the vast majority of human history lost to all.

II.

The words versus shapes debate has also given me a whole new way to understand one of the main things I teach: ear training. Ear training, aural skills, musicianship, or whatever you want to call it is the ability to hear music and turn it into symbolic notation. I play a melody, you write it down in notes and rhythms. This is the bane of most freshman music majors (it was mine as well, life is full of strange twists and turn). Students who are already play their instruments beautifully struggle mightily to translate simple melodies into notation.

This skill lies exactly on the threshold of musical shape and notational symbol. Words and shapes tend to be happy apart from one another. If you have ever read the legal description of a property (it’s on one of the hundreds of sheets of paper before you at a home purchase closing) you understand this. The map, with its lovely shapes, is the proper tool for defining a plot. Words appear helplessly archaic. My six year old’s proficiency following wordless LEGO instructions are a perfect illustration of this.

From the time of literacy we become proficient in translating the soundness of speech into the symbols of writing. For some of us writing becomes the main way we think about language. But learning to do this with music as a young adult makes you feel like a toddler again. Proficient music readers are able to fluently move between the symbol of notation and the world of musical sounds seamlessly. This is what’s going on with sight reading, an incredibly demanding cognitive task. Great sight-readers translate notation to sounds in real musical time, figuring out notes, fingerings, rhythms, and even expression, in real time. Most people can read text at something close to this level, but very few reach this level of musical reading.

I just might incorporate this into my opening class this year.

*When I was in grad school Hollis was still on faculty at Johns Hopkins and ran the humanities program at Peabody. Everyone was a little bit afraid of her because you knew if she was around there was someone much smarter than you in the room. Though very kind, she is a truth-teller by disposition. Anyway, I submitted a paper to her at one point and she called my analysis “very interesting,” a compliment I rode on for months at the time.