TEDtalks: Sing Along!
A great many years ago in my increasingly dim past, I was a bit of a musician.
I never had the talent or stamina to stick with an instrument. As a kid, I took piano lessons, and then classical guitar; I almost killed my mother when I inadvertently threw my despised clarinet through a window, showering her with glass.
Mom was a good pianist and had a great voice — her mother had been organist in their Lutheran church outside Boston — and my parents filled our home with happy and often silly music. Hell, my mother sang with the grocery Muzak, dancing down the toilet paper aisle.
Now it’s me singing along at Murphy’s. In junior high, I was (very briefly) the lead singer in Steve Korba’s atrocious teenage rock band. Still an embarrassing memory. For many years, I played guitar and sang Dylan and James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkel and Cat Stevens, mostly alone in my room, although eventually I went out and got paid a little. One year, I tried busking, playing la guitare américaine in the Paris Métro. It was the mid-’70s, and somehow that was OK.
Now my battered old guitar — a 1973 Guild acoustic with a crack down the front — gathers dust upstairs in the bedroom. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. Who knows? I might pick it up again.
Music is still a constant in my life — at my desk, in the car, making dinner — always someone else’s tunes, although I do sing along. Research shows that music really does soothe the savage beast (or breast, as Susan Bennett explains in her column, page 8), and I know it’s good for my psyche.
“Performing or listening to music activates structures in the brain involved in thinking, sensation, movement and emotion,” and reduces stress and pain, reports the National Institutes of Health.
The dog seems to like it, too. Speaking of dogs: Dr. Jennifer Heidmann’s yellow Lab, Monk (named for the brilliant jazz pianist), is the lab rat for her “Beethoven Dog Project,” an excuse for the doctor to master all 32 of her favorite composer’s piano sonatas for Monk’s enjoyment (see page 5).
If music really does raise cortisol levels and reduce stress and promote calm, then no wonder Humboldt is so laid back. You can’t swing a piano around here without hitting six or eight musicians and a dozen music lovers. I’m not the only guy with a guitar in the bedroom. From the Eureka Symphony and dozens of ensembles to all the aging hippies and their bands, Humboldt is a musical Shangri-La.
At any farmers’ market, you can hear great live local bands. Festivals abound — in October, Humboldt will host its 34th annual Redwood Coast Music Festival (see pages 1 & 20) and Porchfest in Bayside (page 3); the Metropolitan Opera beams in live and various orchestras and choruses are gearing up for their seasons.
Humboldt has so much music and so many music lovers that we added pages to this month’s Senior News to celebrate “Musical Humboldt,” but still couldn’t fit everyone in. Do yourself a big favor and get out there to hear the music in the salty, redwood-freshened air. It’ll make you feel better. And no one will care if you want to sing along.
Ted Pease is editor of Senior News.
