Art, the Ritual, and the Exercise of Finding Meaning

    Art has been used for millennia as a method of communication. From the earliest moments, we find out handprints in paint or mud on the walls of caves. People have put rocks in patterns, called in chant, told stories, slapped their hands together, and stepped with rhythm together as long as we have had limbs to do so, and since we have been able to we have done so for a reason. Art and all of the subcultures and branches and paths and pursuits that make it up communicate to us some idea of the author, writer, sculptor, artist, singer, dancer, musician, or person. Children draw pictures in crayon of the world as they see it, bright and colorful, messy and cutesy, they communicate what they see an enjoy. Other children dance to songs they like, hopping around and enjoying moving the body they are learning to live in. Others still will try to sing, finding their way to notes and enjoying the beat of songs sung by others. As those children who create and tell stories grow, they learn more about the world, they create in new ways they did not conceive of before. The sun moves from the corner to off the page, still yet casting light and now, making shadow. The dancers choose a dicipline, ballet, breakdancing, something that makes sense to them and fits with the rhythms they like. Singers develop and sing new songs, their voices change and they sing new ranges, new parts, new supports, or maybe they pick up a new instrument as I once did and sing with a voice outside of their own. But as each artist moves into their dicipline, as they grow and know, they start changing how they present their art. No longer just sunshine and rainbows, pictures now have subjects and paintings a background, dances are used in specific setting, voices sing sad songs and instruments play low and slow, they stop being merely something done and become something that means something.

    I picked up the violin when I was very young, and as a violinist I learned many, many songs. I played tunes and jigs, dances and silly videogame music, I played Mozart and Suzuki, and I played long and hard. Most every one of these songs was some happy, upbeat song that was fun to play, but lacked great impact beyond being pretty. After a bad bout with my instructor, I decided to take some time away from music. Now that is to say I quit in the way of a small child doing so, I had aa bit of a meltdown and refused to touch the instrument for a few years because I was mad and couldn't express it in a great way. But during the years in which I refused the instrument I still cared for it. I remembered the songs in my head and hands, and I longed to play again, I just couldn't stand the teacher who had inspired me to give up. In fifth grade I had a teacher whose name was Mrs. Theile come into my school one day and announce she was going to lead an orchestra for the school. She was kind and friendly and I did want to play again, so that day I went home and got my violin out of the closest where it had sat for so many years and began to play.  It was terrible of course, years in a box in an environment that changed so wildly with the seasons that the wood had moved and loosened all of the strings, which were now used to being so un-stretched. I spent hours re-tuning and setting up the instrument, now too small for my older body, I pulled the stings which threatened to snap with every millimeter they pulled along and in that snapping tension for every 3 millimeters I could tighten them up they loosened back to more.

    There were ties to the past, of the distance traveled by this violin locked inside its box, which held it back, and as I worked in the rituals of cleaning and care to free the violin from those bonds, in exegesis of this story to you it is very poetic and reflective of the shifting off of the chains of my own burden of the past. I locked away my passion for music and had had that old teacher encouraged me to do so. My shame at abandoning it forced me back away every time I wished to reach back out, like stings unwinding from the position they want to truly be in. As I strained and gently coaxed the strings away from breaking, I loosened up the muscles which knew the music, reawakening those bits of me that knew and held my potential and passion, which could so easily break out from under me again if I did not allow myself to come back to it fully and slowly. In that ritual I now see the story it made and that which it kicked off. I see the path I took after taking that part of me back into my own hands once again, I no longer missed who I was because I had it again. Mrs. Theile taught me not just happy and upbeat music, but complicated and sad pieces, she taught me to see myself in the music and to love even the bits that upset me in their complexity and difficulty. 

    In middle school after I had been given a better suited size of instrument which sang in my fingers, I had another teacher who tested my passion again as she was rather bull-headed and very demanding not just in a musical sense, but in a social sense. But what was important about my time spent in her tutelage was her passions for polka and American fiddle music. These music formats were very different than those I had learned previously, with fiddle music having flexible roles in an orchestral setting, there was more room for improvisational and singular/personal performance. This format was an important step to my love of jazz and Irish fiddle music, as I could more personally express myself in the music, rather than just a part in a chorus, I was using my instrument to sing on its own. 

    As someone who is acquainted with dance in a formal setting as a learner and in a few situations an enraptured observer, only ever a minor side character in a play, only ever a scratching sketch artist, and only a dabbler in the art of true writing, I view the exercise of finding and making meaning in music. Music especially for me, is an impressive method for the communication of a story in an emotive manner. With orchestral music, in the scenes I have experienced it, there is not often any singer, so the song exists solely in how the rhythm and tone do. This limits how direct one can be in the said of the story inherent to the art, but through understanding of the music and its methods, one can communicate directly what the music is saying without anything being said. Through my music I have learned to communicate emotion in a way that I sometimes difficult in words, in art and dance people tell stories they can't say out loud, and in theater people tell stories that hide their meaning in wordplay and metaphor. In my music I find ritual, in long hours spent in practice and care about the piece and the instrument, same as others will do for the methods and tools of their craft, "Man does not conquer the world by mastering the rhythm, but by submitting to it", the ritual of practice and performance and creation allows for the submission of the artist to the art, and by giving in and being swept away in the art, meaning is made.

   All this to say that, as previously quoted in the reading, "each life is a medley of inchoate events waiting to be told in a comprehensive format; each life is an incipient story waiting to be rendered intelligible by a narrator." (P237 The American Camino). The first time I picked up the violin it did not mean anything, the time I spent in repairing my instrument meant nothing, the countless hours I spent practicing meant nothing but progress, and my time learning improv and fiddle didn't mean anything, unless viewed in retrospect, told like this to myself and to you who reads this. Those events were rituals are the exercise by which meaning is found in the art created. A song is never just notes, a dance never just movement, a painting never just a brushstroke, and a play never just words on stage, these ritual carry with them the story one wants to tell, and the power of every moment that led to those words