Waiting for the Train

Just before my trip, I was deep into writing my new book, The Humanitarian Musician: How Musical Harmony Can Lead to Social Harmony. It’s premise is both simple and profoundly radical. I suggest that music properly taught, properly learned, properly heard, properly understood, properly played, can humanize the savage beast running rampant in society. Since we’ve had music ever since we became upright bi-pedal homo sapiens, clearly it hasn’t solved any of our chronic toxic ideas and practices. So I spend much of the book trying to explain that word “properly,” drawing from a lifetime teaching music to children, playing music, listening to music, writing about music. 

I do believe it can radically transform society as we know it and indeed lead us to a more harmonious state of living together on the planet. Still, it’s a pretty grandiose claim. Perhaps by the end of the book, I’ll be content with a lower bar. 

 

For example, today we took the train from Oxford to our next stop, Moreton-in Marsh. When we arrived at the station, we missed the train by five minutes, so had a 55-minute wait ahead. And there in the middle of the small station was a piano! I went straight to it and played Gershwin’s A Foggy Day (in London town) and then Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag. At the end of that, some 25 people gathered around started applauding. An older man went right up to me and said, “You’ve just made us all so happy!” 

 

“My pleasure,” I answered and off I went again. The piano was old and funky, but no one cared. More ragtime, some Bach, jazz standards, some Latin pieces, some blues, La Paloma. One listener told me that that last piece had been her mother’s favorite. Another elderly woman came up to me and said, “This has been the most wonderful time I’ve ever had waiting for a train!” Then a young guy asked if I knew some Ellington and we played a duet of Take the A Train (I know, technically written by Billy Strayhorn, but given the circumstance, no matter). Because time passes differently when you’re playing or listening to music, I was shocked when my wife said I needed to stop to take our train. So I did and ran across the tracks and got in just in time.

 

And so. Music is not going to solve any of the multiple world crisis’s we’re suffering from. But it can bring some pleasure and happiness and fond memories and gleeful participation to a random group of strangers who just happen to be waiting for some 45 minutes in a train station.

 

And maybe that’s enough.