I smiled and looked affectionately at the video of a little girl of five, one of the students of my music academy. She was doing some ‘Sargam’ patterns, which are patterns of musical notes taught in the early stages of classical music learning. The video was to be part of a virtual ‘Baithak’ or music congregation. The Baithak otherwise happens every year at a physical venue, but is forced by COVID to be online this year. As I watched the video, I realized that it was such a heart-warming sight to see this little human seated amidst two ‘gaddas’, or cushions, each double her size, to create an authentic Indian setting. She was wearing a ‘ghagra choli’, an Indian traditional outfit, and so endearingly trying her best to hit the notes right sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. As I watched with amusement and pride at her grit, I also saw something profound in her that is representative of each of us.
We all are innately musical even if we cannot understand music or cannot sing. There is something intrinsically divine about music that touches our souls. This is the reason we have so many people, musically learned and lay persons alike, gravitating towards some form of music, almost like sunflowers to the sun.
However, barring viewing imparting musical training and knowledge as only a commercial activity, I do not see any other reason motivating many professional classical musicians to teach and impart to the musically deprived or less talented. I am reminded once of a music teacher in a music school complaining that he ended up with a ‘bad lot’ of students who couldn’t sing and how one of his peers was ‘lucky’ that he had ‘capable’ students. And that it would have been tolerable if the pay was worth it. I wondered then, and do so even now, that if a person can already sing well, what then is the teacher’s role? This brought me to the gaping hole in the approach to imparting musical education.
In my opinion, there needs to be a lot more humility and compassion in the process of imparting classical music training. While one’s own training as a professional may have needed to be extremely tedious and rigorous, and might have been available only for the so called musically ‘abled’, the approach has to be drastically different for the lay person who longs to experience music. It has to be more inclusive and more forgiving.
First and foremost, there is a need to give up the notion that there is only one place of perfection in music. To me, even moving from being completely unable to hit a single key to being able to sing one note correctly is a point of perfection and needs to be celebrated. Perfection is an illusion. And this illusion is one that many of us musicians have ended up chasing mindlessly without noticing when moments of it happen right under our noses. As I have kept revisiting my views around this issue over the years, I have begun to notice beauty in small things within what I sing, hear and teach. And those moments make it all worthwhile.
There was once a student who came to me saying that she just loved music, but considered herself amusical, and described how she yearned to hit at least a single key right. She wasn’t wrong in her assessment. I watched, sometimes helplessly, for months as I tried to get her to hit a basic key correctly. I wondered whether I was chasing a pipe dream, and whether I ought to tell her that it might be wise for her to not waste any more time. But after months of tireless, tedious work, she finally hit the key right. And to me and to her, it was a moment of bliss that cannot be explained. It was an emotional moment for her, a huge turnaround in her self-esteem. She will most likely not go on to sing professionally or do anything significant with music in the outside world. But she has taken away a piece of music that means the world to her, much more than any ‘perfect’ piece of music she may hear.
The pursuit of music itself is the end. And in every moment of that pursuit lies the potential for happiness, for bliss. This is true not just for us classical music professionals, but for humanity as a whole. The sooner we realize this, the more easily will the divine beauty of music will become accessible to everyone.