September 10, 2014 by willedare

The Ebb and Flow

Autumn is arriving here in Boston, MA.

Summer is ebbing, and cooler air is flowing into our neighborhood.

In the morning I sit on our back porch, wearing a hoodie until the sun warms everything up.

I listen for sounds from the natural world — today, a blue jay — competing with the sound of cars and buses and trucks and motorcycles nearby.

And I happily remember my time last month camping in North Truro on the Cape and next to Cayuga Lake in upstate New York.

I find camping to be a terrific reminder of many important things.

For example, how little water one needs to wash dishes.

Or wash one’s hands.

Or take a shower.

The campground has communal cabins with sinks and toilets and showers, but the sinks have taps which automatically shut off after about three seconds — a simple and very effective reminder to use water more mindfully — and the showers are activated by quarters (25 cents for three minutes of hot water).

And in upstate New York I simply jumped — except for the times when my feisty nephew Ryder pushed me — into the lake each morning and then scrubbed with Dr. Bronner’s soap and a washcloth.

We had no radio, no TV, and no internet.

We awoke early — due to birds singing their morning calls — and went to bed early, too.

Sometimes we all sang together after dinner — songs written by the Beatles being the most popular…

I wrote new songs for most of each day — happily holed up on the boathouse or in a tent with my ukulele and laptop computer and rhyming dictionary — and then joined other family members for a swim in the late afternoon.

One of the most powerful part of camping for me is being reminded of the ebb and flow of life.

We see it at the beach.

The waves flow in and out at the water’s edge.

The tide rises and falls, sweeping the ocean shore clean of footprints twice a day — while revealing (and later concealing) sand bars, rocks, shells, crabs, sea weed, drift wood, and tiny jumping sand fleas.

Back at our campground, we see neighboring tent sites fill with new arrivals and then empty out at the end of each week.

What was once a colorful array of tents and campers and cars and coolers and towels and bikes returns to being a community of pine trees, squirrels, golden finches, blueberry bushes and open air.

I find it a very poignant reminder of mortality — my own as well as the mortality of all the people and places and animals and plants I love here on planet earth.

This feeling of mortality seeped into a song I wrote, “Under My Umbrella,” which is embedded at the top of the page.

It seems to fit with the days getting shorter as we approach the autumnal equinox.

Deep breath in.

Deep breathe out.

Thanks for reading…and listening.

April 29, 2014 by willedare

Everybody Says Don’t…

Image by laurenta_photography from Pixabay

One of my favorite Stephen Sondheim songs — “Everybody Says Don’t” (on the player embedded above) — is from his first official flop, Anyone Can Whistle, which starred Angela Lansbury, Harry Guardino, and Lee Remick on Broadway in 1964 and ran for nine performances.

Among other topics, the plot explored the classic question of who is saner — the folks in a mental hospital or those who are not.

“Everybody Says Don’t” invites us to consider how we make choices.

Many of us make choices based on what other people say or think.

Sometimes this demonstrates a healthy respect for our shared values as human beings — and helps to keep our societies more, rather than less, civil.

Sometimes it’s a way to avoid saying or doing something important — something which might be utterly, uniquely, and profoundly why we are alive here and now on planet earth.

I might have stayed in my non-musical day job as a PR/development/events professional for another 16 years if I hadn’t been laid off.

The job offered me teamwork, camaraderie, shared purpose, a paycheck, respect from my peers, and daily surprises/challenges.

But it was not tapping very deeply into my musical soul.

Now I am devoted to making music for a living — as a performer, a songwriter, and a Music Together teacher.

The sentiment of “Everybody Says Don’t” reminds me of one of the guiding principles of Music Together — that anything a child chooses to do during class is fine and needs to be respected as part of their learning process/style.

A child’s caregiver may want them to sit still and “play” a drum — or a shaker egg, or a triangle, or a set of wooden sticks — in a particular manner.

But their way of soaking up the music in class may involve moving their bodies around the room, sitting in a corner (seemingly disconnected from everything happening in class), or bouncing up and down in someone’s lap.

As long as the child is not endangering themselves or hurting someone else in class, s/he is free to respond to the music in her/his own fashion — which may change from song to song and class to class.

I sometimes imagine the adult caregivers (moms, dads, nannies, grand mothers, grand fathers, au pairs, uncles, aunts and more) as younger versions of themselves — who may have been told somewhere along the line: “don’t sing so loudly,” or “don’t sing out of tune,” or worst of all, “don’t sing — just move your lips.”

One never knows what musical wounds people may be bringing into our classrooms…

As one teacher remarked at the end of a three day Music Together seminar, “90% of our job is showing up with a compassionate heart.”

I guess that could be true about a lot of our interactions here on planet earth…

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Thank you for reading and listening to this blog post.

I welcome any comments you might be inspired to share below.

February 28, 2014 by willedare

Hints Of Spring

Last weekend I saw a dad herding two small boys wearing rubber boots.

They were delightedly stomping their way across a very large puddle.

The sun was shining.

Snow was melting everywhere.

The air almost felt warm on my face.

Ahh, the intoxicating approach of spring!

Robins have landed twice on the bushes outside my bedroom window, eating berries that — miraculously — remain on the branches.

Two male cardinals have been jousting in the airspace around our house — flashes of scarlet fluttering from fence to roof to branch and then back to fence — all the while uttering a passionate selection of hormone-infused songs.

Soon tiny frogs will wake up and start peeping in the wetlands behind my friend Doug Hammer’s studio to the north of Boston.

A few years ago Doug found a great sound sample of spring peepers, and we added it to my Snow Flake Song (playable at the top of this post).

Right now the peep frogs are still hibernating under a log or behind the loose bark of a tree.

When they are full grown, spring peepers are only an inch and a half long.

According to a National Geographic article I found online, they tend to peep in trios….

Who knew?

If you have time, please consider clicking here to watch a video I made a few years ago for the Snow Flake Song.

It features many different kinds of flowers blooming.

Happy (almost) spring!

February 14, 2014 by willedare

And So It Goes

Another Valentine’s Day is here.

Lots of snow.

I bought a box of cards at CVS yesterday so that I can hand out child-sized Valentines to the little ones in my Music Together class.

There were cards which featured wrestling action stars and others with garish visual special effects.

There were cards publicizing children’s movies and TV shows.

I showed my final choice — puppies and kittens with accompanying tattoos — to a mom in the card aisle.

She assured me that most parents are OK with temporary tattoos.

We shall see…

I have long admired the song I included at the beginning of this post.

“And So It Goes” is one of Billy Joel’s most beautiful, wise ballads.

I recorded it with Bobbi Carrey — who provided harmony near the end — and Doug Hammer — who played piano and engineered simultaneously — at Doug’s great studio outside Boston.

It is one of the tracks on our CD, If I Loved You.

There are more tracks from that CD in the music player on the right hand column of this blog, including “I’ll Be Here With You,” “What Is This Thing Called Love?” “Dog At The Pound,” and the title track, “If I Loved You.”

I realize — not surprisingly —that almost every song in the right hand column of this blog is about love.

Music has an uncanny power to re-connect us with our hearts.

May you have much music in your life on this — and every — day.

January 15, 2014 by willedare

The Starry Night

What is it about Vincent Van Gogh’s painting “The Starry Night” that touches so many of our human hearts?

At the end of December I was wandering through the Museum of Modern Art in New York City when I happened upon his masterpiece.

First I noticed the scrum of people who were jockeying for position in front of it.

Then I noticed the guard who had the extraordinary responsibility of making sure that none of the members of the scrum got close enough to damage the painting.

And then I saw it…The Starry Night.

And tears immediately appeared in my eyes.

Even with a crowd of people taking photos of it, taking photos of themselves in front of it, and tweeting and texting their friends about it, “The Starry Night” was serenely, astoundingly beautiful.

I don’t know if I cried partly because I, too, love to gaze at the night sky — amazed at the beauty of the stars and the vastness of the universe — and Van Gogh captures it so well in this painting?

Or if I was reminded of Don McLean’s song “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night),” which speaks so poignantly about how little respect or success Van Gogh earned in his lifetime — as well as his eventual suicide?

The juxtaposition of the clamoring crowd of art-lovers in the 21st century and Van Gogh’s downwardly mobile existence in the 19th century was odd.

And yet we all still share the same huge questions — about how our finite lives relate to the unimaginably vast realms of space, about what happens to us when our bodies die, about how our wonderful blue-green planet fits into the swirling patterns of the universe, about time…and space…and love…and loss.

Ahh, art.

Ahh, music.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

If you are curious to learn more, here is a link to MOMA’s web page for “The Starry Night.”

Special thanks to pianist Doug Hammer, at whose Dream World studio we recorded the version of “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)” you can hear by clicking at the top of this blog entry.

January 6, 2014 by willedare

I’m A Baby Monkey

One of the things I love most about teaching Music Together is the concept that each person absorbs and processes music in their own way.

Some children — and some adults, too — like to sit still while they soak up the sights and sounds swirling around them.

Others like to move their bodies — swaying, clapping, tapping their toes, nodding their heads, or even jumping up to dance in the center of the circle.

Still others prefer to wander around the room, seemingly oblivious to the musical activity unfolding all around them.

And yet these same children will often start singing their own versions of the songs as soon as they leave class…

I love the respect for different learning styles that is baked into the Music Together pedagogy.

As long as no one is hurting themselves or distracting the rest of the class, whatever she or he wants to do in class is OK.

At times this can make for a somewhat chaotic classroom experience.

But if the teacher and a majority of the adults are able to keep participating — singing, moving, chanting, drumming, dancing, marching, and so forth — the class flows on.

The grown ups copy the teacher.

The children copy their accompanying grown up, the teacher, the other grown ups, and the other children.

And I am always looking for movements and ideas from the children and grownups in the class which I can mirror, highlight, and somehow incorporate into the flow of my lesson plan.

It can become a very rich — and fun — environment of “monkey see, monkey do” feedback loops.

I wrote the song at the top of this page, “I’m A Baby Monkey,” before I became a Music Together teacher.

Serendipitous foreshadowing?

I have not officially released it to the world…

But many families have enjoyed it over the years via an email copy.

Thank you for reading and listening to this blog post.

Thank you to Apple for creating their laptop computers and their GarageBand program.

Thank you to the terrific photographers at Pixabay.

Thank you to the wonderful monkeys in these photos.

And thank you to all of the families who have chosen to make music together with me over the years!

I am very grateful.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

November 18, 2013 by willedare

We Never Know Who Is Listening…

One of the truly magical aspects of a musical life on planet earth in the 21st century is how widely one can share one’s songs if one has access to the internet.

After Bobbi Carrey, Doug Hammer and I — with lots of help from Mike Callahan, Jonathan Wyner, and guest musicians — recorded our CD “If I Loved You,” we heard from family, friends AND folks whom we had never met.

One listener included our version of the David Friedman ballad “I’ll Be Here With You” (which you can hear by clicking on the right hand sidebar of this page) on a CD she sent to her fiance who was serving in the US military overseas.

Another fan — who had been given our CD by a friend — tracked us down and told us that she listened to our music each morning while she worked out. When her husband died, she asked us to sing at his memorial service.

And I recently learned — in a reply to my blog post about music and spontaneity — that a CD of my “Will Loves Steve” show (which features songs written by people named Stephen, Steven, Stevie or Steve) had traveled from Massachusetts to Argentina, where it helped lift the spirits of someone who was feeling very low.

Here’s a selection from that show — “Overjoyed by Stevie Wonder…

The pianist is Doug Hammer, and the horn player is Mike Callahan.

I am curious to see how my musical endeavors may continue to ripple around the planet thanks to the internet.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Ahh, music!

ps: Since I wrote this blog post almost 12 years ago, I have begun distributing music to various streaming platforms.

You can click here for a streaming link to my version of Overjoyed” in case you might like to add it to a playlist and/or “like” it on Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.

Thank you for reading, listening and maybe even leaving a comment!

November 9, 2013 by willedare

Synchronized Heartbeats!

Earlier this year a fellow WordPress blogger directed me to new research from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

The study — named ‘Kroppens Partitur’ or ‘The Body’s Musical Score’ — monitored the pulses of fifteen choral singers as they made their way through three different exercises: humming, performing a hymn, and chanting a slow mantra.

The authors of the study reported:

“When you are singing, the heartbeat for the whole group is going up and down simultaneously…It gives you pretty much the same effect as yoga breathing. It helps you relax, and there are indications that it does provide a heart benefit.”

This synchronization is thought to be caused by the breathing patterns which the music inspires in the singers.

When they are singing the same melody, they tend to pause to breathe in the same place, and these breathing patterns then influence their heart rates.

I love learning about this research, because it corroborates what human beings have experienced for thousands of years — singing with other human beings is a special, healthy and often uplifting experience.

It also reminds me how important it is to include “sing-along” songs as part of a performance.

Who wouldn’t want an opportunity for a room full of people’s hearts to synchronize?

“Blue Moon” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart is a song which Bobbi Carrey and I included in our In Perfect Harmony show in hopes that people might sing (or hum or whistle) along with us.

I have included a version that we recorded with Doug Hammer on the piano at the very beginning of this blog post.

I have long been aware of how intimate singing with another person can be — whether in unison or in harmony — but I didn’t realize that Bobbi and I might actually be synchronizing our heartbeats when we perform together.

Yowza!

Ahh, blessed music…

And the human heart…

Deep breath in.

Deep breathe out.

October 25, 2013 by willedare

Getting In Tune With The Infinite

I have been been blessed to sing wonderful songs written by other people for many years — as the MP3 player on the right hand sidebar of this page can attest.

And every now and then I have helped to co-write a song.

But it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I bought my first ukulele, that I started writing songs on a regular basis.

The song in the player at the beginning of this blog post is one I recorded using my this ukulele and Apple’s wonderful GarageBand program on my laptop.

I love learning about how other songwriters have created their hits.

Composer Harry Warren and lyricist Johnny Mercer, for example, co-wrote “Jeepers, Creepers,” “On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” and “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby.”

And at some point Warren gave Mercer the nickname ‘Cloud Boy’.

As Warren explained, “A lot of times when I would play a melody for John… particularly if it was after a good lunch… he’d stretch out on a couch and just lie there with his eyes closed and his hands folded across his stomach. He was way up there some place in the clouds. Of course, what came out later was just great.”

When asked by his father about his creative process, Mercer once said, “I simply get to thinking over the song — pondering over it in my mind — and all of a sudden I get in tune with the Infinite.”

Many songwriters have expressed a similar sentiment — that they feel as though they are acting as a conduit or channel for something greater than themselves.

The lyricist Ira Gershwin said that the composer Harold Arlen would never “approach the simplest musical requirement or idea without first calling upon ‘the fellow up there’ — jabbing his finger at the ceiling.”

I cannot say that I have experienced this phenomenon yet.

I have, however, noticed that lyrical themes sometimes emerge which surprise me and lead a song in a different direction than I had originally intended.

And I have had the inspiring experience of writing a song which gradually became true.

It is called “Can We Slow It Down?” — and I wrote it a couple of years ago when I was working full time at my day job in Harvard Square.

I realized recently when I was practicing it at home that my life has in fact slowed down since I began singing this song.

If you are curious, you can listen to two different versions of “Can We Slow It Down?” — the ukulele + GarageBand version at the top of this page and the piano/vocal version I released with pianist Doug Hammer by clicking here.

I will be singing it plus two other originals as part of a mini-set at a lovely open mic in Lexington — hosted by Nourish Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue — on Tuesday, November 5, 2013, starting around 7:30 pm.

Perhaps you can join us.

October 4, 2013 by willedare

Music and Spontaneity

I am at an open mic run by the Boston Association of Cabaret Artists (BACA) in an elegant UU church in Watertown, MA.

Steve Heck — a wonderful local pro — is playing the grand piano, and I am singing “Over The Rainbow.”

It is one of the songs in a new show about Harold Arlen which I have recently begun performing with pianist Joe Reid.

After Steve takes a piano solo, I re-enter at the bridge of the song (“Some day I’ll wish upon a star…”) and then I hear elevator doors opening behind me.

Three women — friends of Steve Heck, I later learn — appear on stage with me.

They did not realize that the elevator would deposit them there.

I turn and — still singing — welcome them so that I can escort them across the stage and down into the audience.

But as I do this, I realize that they probably love music and very likely know the words to “Over The Rainbow;” so I encourage them to stay with me onstage and sing — which they happily do.

One woman in particular catches my attention because she is adding a beautiful harmony in a great big, belting voice.

We make eye contact as the song builds to a dramatic climax of “Why oh why can’t I?” — each of us singing at the top of our lungs, my microphone completely unnecessary.

The entire series of events lasts less than a minute, and the entire room is happily caught up in the moment.

Afterwards, during a break period, I am asked how I managed to time their arrival so perfectly.

I explain that I had never met them before and that the entire experience was utterly spontaneous — unfolding moment by moment with no guidance other than the lyrics of the song, Steve Heck’s solid accompaniment, and our shared love of music.

Ahh, music!

Ahh, spontaneity!

I have been experiencing a lot of spontaneous musical moments in the past few months.

Joe Reid and I put together our hour-long Harold Arlen program in one rehearsal that lasted about two hours.

He is a jazz pianist who is very comfortable making music in the here and now.

I brought a bunch of Arlen sheet music to his house plus a rough idea of a song run order.

We double-checked the keys for all the songs, played each one through once or twice, and Joe was ready to take it public.

So far we have performed at two retirement communities with very enthusiastic audiences (and we did get together for another hour-long rehearsal between our first and second performances…)

I also spent many additional hours making sure I knew exactly how the song was originally written, reading several books about Arlen I ordered from my local library, recording practice piano tracks with Doug Hammer, memorizing lyrics, and writing the “patter” to lead from one song to the next.

All of this preparation helps me to surrender to the moment when we are performing these wonderful songs.

Me and one of my favorite MT participants of all time!

I have also begun leading Music Together (MT) classes in Arlington and Belmont (a neighboring town where Mitt and Ann Romney used to live).

MT is a very-well-researched and very-well-planned program to introduce small children — along with their caregivers — to the joy and fun of active music-making.

Although participants are encouraged to learn 30 new songs accurately — each one carefully selected to include a wide variety of keys and rhythms — per semester, we teachers are given free rein to be spontaneous and improvisatory during class.

I am sure my training during the past six months to become a MT teacher helped me to go with the flow at the BACA open mic when those three women appeared onstage.

And I have experienced many moments of musical connection with children and caregivers during my first two weeks of MT classes which have given me a similar jolt of delight.

I think this might be what I am supposed to be doing here on planet earth…

The song in the player at the beginning of this blog post is a Harold Arlen/Johnny Mercer classic called “Accentuate the Positive” which I recorded with pianist Doug Hammer during a rehearsal for the “Mostly Mercer” show that singer Bobbi Carrey and I created last year.

Image by Gabriele M. Reinhardt from Pixabay

Thank you to Doug Hammer, Joe Reid and Bobbi Carrey for being important musical collaborators.

Thank you to the generous and skillful photographers at Pixabay.

Thank you to all of the families who have signed up for my Music Together classes.

And thank YOU for reading and listening to another one of my blog posts!

Deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

amusicalifeonplanetearth

Music and the Thoughts It Can Inspire

music

The Ebb and Flow

Everybody Says Don’t…

Hints Of Spring

And So It Goes

The Starry Night

I’m A Baby Monkey

We Never Know Who Is Listening…

Synchronized Heartbeats!

Getting In Tune With The Infinite

Music and Spontaneity