Spending time in quiet places is very important for mental health. What’s amazing is that when you are quiet, you notice how much music there is everywhere.
As a musician, I know the difference between composing a song and the sounds all around me, but the longer I’m alive, the more I appreciate the phenomenal music produced by the world.
To just sit in my backyard in New Orleans and listen is remarkable. The beating rhythms of the city combined with the melodies of birds, roosters cockle-dooing, and dogs barking. Then the cadences of traffic, construction, school buses, and trash trucks all rise up in a grand orchestra.
I grew up in the country and the closest paved road was down a quarter-mile dirt driveway. I remember the sounds then. Hundreds of pigeons and marshland birds, the wind rushing through the trees and the cornfields. The tin on the barn loose and rattling, and the far-off sounds of farm machinery or cars sailing past.
I realize that every sound I ever created with a piano or with my voice originated and was influenced by the world’s sounds. When I thumped, arpeggiated, and sang together with other musicians, we were borrowing from our own experiences replicating the landscape around us.
Sit and listen to the music of the world once in a while. Let it envelop you in waves. What a beautiful symphony the world makes. What gorgeous noise, what serene silence, what a rhapsody of delightful sounds.
Interested in talking more about music, words, or other creative projects? Get in contact with me.