Recently in luthery Category

Since that time (and perhaps before, though I don't have a distinct recollection) I've had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vivid dreams along these lines. In some I'm in a workshop, or the back room of an out-of-the-way junk shop. In others I'm onstage (perhaps with Miles or Dylan or Mingus--wish fulfillment, you might say), or at a house party or outdoors somewhere, jamming on a horn or stringed instrument--some relatively mundane, some amazingly fantastical. Some of the instruments are ones I own and play in waking life (including, particularly, ones I have made). In any case, there's an ecstatic buzz connected with the experience, which is actually not so different from what it's like in waking life.

I started playing trumpet when I was 10 years old, in school. At times my feeling for the instrument was ambivalent, and I put it down for a year or so on a couple of occasions. When I was 21 or 22 I discovered Don Cherry and felt like I'd stepped into an open field where before I'd been in a tunnel. His use of a pocket trumpet inspired me to pick one up, and I found that the experience of playing it was completely different than the standard trumpet (which I never played again afterward). Functionally everything is the same between the two instruments: they have the same range (same length of tubing, only the pocket trumpet is wound in an extra loop to make it more compact), use the same mouthpiece (though some pocket trumpets use a cornet mouthpiece, which is practically the same but not identical). For me, the crucial difference is not simply the sound--the pocket trumpet actually tends to have a slightly rougher tone, and is slightly harder to keep in tune--but the placement, the location of the sound. With this instrument, I feel like it comes directly out of me--from my gut, my lungs, my lip--instead of something happening at a distance, over there somewhere...

This may seem tangential, but actually it's at the heart of any approach to the idea of sacred space--not just because music has always been associated with every sort of sacred experience (never mind the Taleban--the brutality they promote is the opposite), but because any activity that doesn't bring you into a direct experience has lost the game. Why do kids occasionally act bored? Because they can tell the difference between something happening away from them and something they're inside of. 

This is also fundamental to addressing global warming. Pollution that people experience directly is much more likely to generate action. People have visceral reactions when they witness a sludge-filled river, when the air stinks and their eyes burn, when their children can't breathe. They may feel constrained from resolving the problem (it's beyond their apparent means) but if given an opportunity they're relatively likely to be motivated to do something about it. But global warming occurs at a distance--certainly a displacement in time, if not location. It is not personally immediate. Even highly intelligent, educated, socially engaged people, while they may take the issue seriously, are subject to more immediate concerns--health and economic survival, for example--that will always displace something occurring at a distance. As it becomes closer to direct experience, the motivation will increase.

Direct experience--full engagement with the activity--does not actually require a nonstop high-intensity focus. It requires a steadiness of attention, receptivity, a flexible ability to seep beyond the edges of the linear melody to absorb the overtone resonances that create the fullness of a full sound. It's an interweaving of absorption and agility. Both the particle and the wave. Sometimes one predominates for a moment, but the ability to deeply hear what your fellow musicians are playing and contribute something not just complementary but harmonious in a way that pulls the whole sound beyond the physical constraints of the mundane world, requires a kind of devotion to the act of creation itself. (Not just an expectation of future reward, though that's been known to motivate people up to a point.)

Actually, the gratification is immediate, when everything weaves together in that magical-seeming way. But it takes hours of practice to get there, even for someone who starts out with above-average capacity (a.k.a. talent, which is helpful but not necessarily the deciding factor). According to a currently popular notion, mastery requires ten thousand hours of dedicated practice to reach. Which sounds about right, but the notion does have some flaws (for example, implications that it's applicable to any activity; that "mastery," or expertise, is quantifiable; that there's an identifiable endpoint to development). 

When I was 14 or 15 I started playing guitar. I spent a lot of time with it, and by my mid-twenties I suppose I'd become a passably competent musician, with some rough edges that didn't bother me too much (still don't). By sometime in my thirties I'm sure I'd put in something like ten thousand hours between the horn and guitar, though with all sorts of gaps, so I'm not sure how that adds up. In order to hold my own as a serious professional horn player I'd have to average (by my own estimation) at least four hours a day practicing, and I realized long ago I'm not committed enough to do that. 

But what I'm getting at is a bit different from the notion of mastery. The few times I've held to that sort of intensive practice schedule (for three or four months at a stretch, at most--it's sort of hard to maintain if you happen to be employed in some unrelated way, or if you want to see any friends who aren't also standing next to you on stage or sipping a drink alone at a table halfway across the room--sorry, can't talk right now, gotta boo-dap, bdoo-dap, beetu bweetu battadoo-bdap) I have managed to tap into something that I've also experienced from intensive practice in other activities (martial arts, meditation, luthery, writing and house building, at least). This is an experience of cracking a code, of suddenly (or sometimes gradually) noticing that I have an extra set of ears, a new language, a momentary unnameable connection with the original source of energy and consciousness. That's what I mean by engagement. That's an inkling of the idea of "sacred."