I started learning the violin just shy of my 5th birthday. I’m the youngest of 4 kids, and all of them played stringed instruments. So it was only natural that we start a family string quartet (some of you might even remember The Goheen String Quartet??). We played our first wedding when I was 7 and then gigged together regularly for the next 11 years until I moved away for university.
Playing with my siblings was one of the most beautiful gifts of my childhood. When you play music together, you can’t help but become family. Part of the fun (and the work…and the frustration) is the push and pull of tuning your frequencies together. And it involves much more than just listening to your own note and the notes of the others.
The magic of tuning in a group is that you must listen beyond the notes that are being played. You listen for the the way the frequencies vibrate together in the air around you. Literally, the interactions of sound waves themselves. That’s how you know if you are in tune with each other or not. If you only know how to listen to the tones themselves what you create will always be approximate.
Through those years of playing with my siblings in our quartet, it became habit for me to notice the resonances of frequencies all around me and meld my own part with it.
There’s a phrase that I have used for years without thinking - when I hear something that connects with me at a gut level, I say that I “resonate with that.” Somehow now, I don’t think that saying is only metaphorical. In moments of connection, there is a deep resonance that we are tuning. Together. The song that is ringing “in the air” beyond the obvious notes that are being played. Each person beyond their words and actions in any given moment in time.
There is no connection without resonance. The fun (and the work…and the frustration) of connection is being fully present. Tuning the resonance in, and among, and beyond the notes. Because in the end, we’re all family.
💧 Brie
Enjoy this video. It’s a really entertaining watch!