New Ap—Not!

What goes on in your head when you’re not watching? Be it in your daydreams or night dreams, what thoughts or sounds or images are swirling around in your grey matter? It’s one way to figure out which of our multiple intelligences tends to be our default one, the one that is wholly ours without our intention, the one we were born with and born to develop. 

 

Stories abound of musicians hearing all the notes in their head before writing them down on paper, scientists solving mysteries with images that come to them in their dreams, writers that have perfectly formed sentences arrive that get them up in the middle of the night to jot them down on the nearest scrap of paper. It’s the way our unconscious “declares its major.”

 

When I first read Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, I was fascinated to discover that while my entire life was devoted to teaching music, I wasn’t actually a musician in this sense. Except for occasional earworms, I wasn’t walking around hearing music in my head. It seemed that the linguistic intelligence, my predilection with putting vague ideas into more articulate words and phrases, was really the dominant mode of engaging with the world. 

 

And in a strange way, this was —and is— what made me a good music teacher. Being a “non-musician” who got as far as one can go with music as my “minor” rather than “major” helped make me more patient and tolerant for the kids and adults who likewise were not born to music. “Real” musicians often are notoriously impatient with their students who simply can’t hear things the way that they can and don’t have any strategies to enlarge the hearing and understanding of their pupils. 

 

Feels like my legacy will be more about my ten books exploring those strategies, my talks and lectures, these blogposts rather than memorable musical compositions or recordings of inspired improvisations. The way I feel compelled to connect what goes on in the music classroom with greater issues of humanitarian communities, social justice and the soul’s work, all of which have fascinated me my whole life. Using my linguistic aptitudes to reveal, to shine light on, to express what other people feel but haven’t found the words for (a common and always-appreciated comment many have made about my writing). 

 

So why this title? Because the way electronics are creeping into my dreams, last night they announced that whatever I was thinking in my dream life would automatically go into the Notes on my phone and I didn’t need to get up and search for a pen and paper. In this way, the musician’s score in their head would already be fully formed on some electronic music-writing ap (What? No more Finale or Sibelius! I’ve heard rumors of something called Dorico), the scientist’s breakthrough would be ready to print out to present at the next Conference, the dancer’s choreography would be videoed, the artist’s painting ready to go. 

 

Some might think, “Fantastic! I’m sure AI can do it someday!” But I hope not. The old tried-and-true method of dream it, bring it slowly into focus and do the work to birth it into form, then re-work it and edit it and re-work it again. Whether Shakespeare or Da Vinci or Bach or Martha Graham or Mary Oliver or Hazel Scott or Einstein or Steph Curry, this is the proven durable method to human invention, imagination and intellectual accomplishment. 

 

Happy dreams!