Last night, I was able to experience a live performance of Matthew Good at the TCU place in Saskatoon. My girlfriend and I took off from Regina after school and made an evening trip of it, returning to the city after the show was done. For any readers who are unaware of Matthew Good, he is a Canadian artist from Fort Coquitlam, BC (now residing in Vancouver) who has just released his 11th full-length album entitled Vancouver. He is also the man behind some more recognizable hit songs such as Apparitions, Hello Time Bomb, Weapon and Born Losers. For more information on him, I would recommend checking out www.matthewgood.org.
Shot @ TCU Place, Saskatoon, Nov. 19/09
Moving on, Matthew Good has been and probably will always be one of the most influential artists in my lifetime and seeing him last night was an absolute thrill, even though it is around my 5th time seeing him live. It never gets old, thankfully. It made me happier knowing I was seeing him live with my girlfriend who is as big a fan as I am, although she has never had the opportunity to see him in concert with the whole band (we saw him play an acoustic set a couple years back). Seeing Good in concert came at a perfect time as well, because I had recently come across a video on TED.com explaining the fundamentals of listening to music without your ears.
This video featured Evelyn Glennie, a deaf percussionist from Scotland who has been playing since before she lost her hearing at age 12. She is in her middle years now and her talent for percussion instruments is utterly jaw-dropping. Glennie explained in this video the importance to “test our listening skills, to use our bodies as a resonating chamber, to stop the judgement…” Glennie has literally gone most of her life without aurally hearing the sound she is creating on her instruments. Kind of like a modern day Beethoven. On that note (no pun intended), she speaks about how she learned to listen to music without her ears. She began listening with her chest and her fingers, her toes and her arms… Few parts of her body are missed as she is listing off which ones she uses to hear the music. What is even more thought provoking is the fact that her teacher and her came up with the strategy together of how to learn to listen. It had not been the educator’s idea in the first place, but instead, a project that both of them undertook. Sounds like life-long learning as an educator, doesn’t it? Exactly what our faculty stresses of us.
For those of us with ears, this may come off as a challenge. It is pretty hard not to listen to something with our ears when they are working as they should be. It is almost impossible to plug them to a point where all sound just does not come through. The idea I took from this video is to open up the rest of yourself to the music. As Glennie said, use your body as a resonating chamber and continue to observe the effects of a sound after it has already faded. In her words, “experience the whole journey of that sound”. So that is what I attempted to do at the Matt Good show last night. I tried to experience the whole journey. I was not sure what to expect, but for most of the show, I could feel the vibrations of the sounds traveling through me. I don’t know if what I felt is what Glennie was talking about exactly, but I do know that I began to concentrate more on something that I had not really focused on in the past. It made songs he performed that were years old new again, sending butterflies through my stomach. It made me wacko for songs I was not crazy about earlier on. My girlfriend and I wish the show had never ended. Unfortunately, it did, and now I’m here writing about it, and Glennie.
One more thing I took away from Glennie’s discussion was that although an artist may not hear his music quite the way the audience hears it because he is behind it all, they are ultimately “experiencing something so unbelievably pure which is before the sound is actually happening”. Riddle me that.
I am studying to be a music teacher, and that is why I chose to hear out Glennie. However, as an artist and performer, I have not ever consciously considered the idea of experiencing the sound before it is actually happening, until now.
Thank you Evelyn Glennie, and Matthew Good.
Why do some people who go deaf insist on becoming great musicians. As astonishing as their feat is, I still feel compassion for them. There is nothing like really hearing music.