Music Lessons

Music Lessons (2020) by Bob Wiseman

Genre: Collection of musings about music by a talented musician, producer, and music teacher who is most known for being in a Canadian band with a sizable cult following.

Recommended For: Someone who loves music and likes thinking about how it’s made and also maybe is the type of person who hates Donald Trump but would get mad at a young person for protesting “the wrong way” or something like that

There are people who love the band Blue Rodeo. I’m not one of them, but they have a handful of songs that I like enough that I would both understand the idea of someone loving them and if I were to see a book by their former piano player with a series of unconnected thoughts about his post-Blue Rodeo career as an accomplished producer and music teacher, I’m probably going to read it.

I think, generally, most people who pick up this book are going to like it. A skilled writer with a lot of experiences and a high-level knowledge of writing and passable sense of humor writing short chapters scratches some sort of itch, I suppose. I didn’t much care for it.

It’s not Wiseman comes across as pretentious (though he does). It’s that this image of a music teacher - basically this image of what a lot of people might imagine as the best type of music teacher; smart, accomplished, liberal-minded, funny, not suffering bullshit, etc. - is a sad way for music to be championed and instilled in the world.

There’s a whole lot of fetishizing of soloing, which he sells quite well, with a lot of adverbs and a lot of authority. I don’t buy it, and I think Herbie Hancock and the late Wayne Shorter would cringe at the way he talks about their solos, pumping them up in a way that disconnects them from the collective that gets them out of bed in the morning. Wiseman makes fun of autotune, which would be weird even if autotune hadn’t already mostly fallen out of popular fashion by the time the book was published in 2020.

He sort of is facilitating between trying to solve “good” music looks like and what annoys him in a way that makes it seem like one of his students is about to get in trouble because T-Pain just put out a new song.

My wife writes about music better than anyone I’ve ever read. I might have been in love with the way she could write about music before I met her, if we’re being honest. Later I would learn that she went to school to become a music teacher but got distracted by the possibility of researching music history, talking to great musicians and living in those worlds.

There’s a lot that goes into any type of teaching. But a broad philosophy matters. Not necessarily one that you create for teaching, but one you bring to it. One time I was trying to force out of my wife why she liked a particular local live act so much. She responded that “music is an act of generosity” and that the act understood that.

That’s not to say music can’t be a lot of other things. But that might really be it right there, at the heart at any given one of them.

Here’s a passage Music Lessons:

“I improvise - after all, that’s what I do. I’ll ask a student they won’t know the answer to because they were on their computer. It makes everyone look at them, it makes for embarrassment, seems fair to me, like this is now the lesson. Same with the audience member who’s loud. I’ll musically imitate them or makeup lyrics and sing about them. This means a certain amount of students or audience members will think that I’m an asshole, maybe I am an asshole, but maybe it’s a creative response. Either way it’s a distraction from why I’m there, and it’s not what I want to do. I just want to deliver the goods, dignity intact.”

I’ve written a lot of stuff in my life. I’m certain I’ve written more sentences than Wiseman and let me tell you: That’s the kind of thing you write when you don’t know what the hell you’re writing. And let me ask you: Why do I want to read that?

I’ve seen some of the most talented musicians in the world. I’ve met a handful of them. What they’ve done with their life is generous. The discipline it requires came from somewhere, sure. I can’t speak to it. I just know I was on the receiving end of a gift, and someone taught them to give.

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-How Hard Is It To Oppose Murder?

-Is Life A Game?

-Repetition Compulsion 2000-2025