This spring I was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to support my workshop, Just Listening. It matters deeply to be noticed, recognized for what one does. I’ve been working on a new venture for several years now, always returning to the idea that I am bringing an experience of value to others. That makes me able to stick my neck out and promote it. As a fundamentally very shy person, it’s not easy, never has been, for me to promote myself. But with this work, I can promote the experience.
To have the MCC recognize value and award me an unrestricted grant to use in developing my workshop is amazing. In addition to feeling grateful, I am empowered to bring the experience to as many places right here in Maynard as I possibly can, to contact schools in the area and further west in Massachusetts where the kind of awakenings that Just Listening brings will be refreshing and unheard of by most participants. Hearing new and unusual music, building community through encounters with challenging music, experiencing a diversity of reactions among fellow students, discovering sympathies with some outside one’s group… so much to awaken!
So I have this feeling of being noticed, and I can see that this is what I bring to groups. When I did the workshops at Housing Works, with formerly unhoused people, staff members remarked on the fact that some people spoke up and participated who never do so. That was a result of being noticed, of being genuinely asked what was heard. We all respond to being noticed, we all need to be noticed, and some of us have fallen so far off the scale that it hurts. I want to help people prosper by opening the door to a greater sense of self-value, the opening that starts to heal communities.
I am writing in the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a time when expressions of gratitude are traditional, even expected. This thought turns me toward my past, to realize just how grateful I am for the people who noticed me, paid attention to me, over the course of my life. The “course of my life”, interesting thought, of life as a course. If mine has been anything, it has been a course in developing gratitude and compassion. Just thinking of my life in music, the intermittent stream of people noticing me affirmed my sense of mattering, and emboldened me to continue ahead.
Let me then recognize some of the people who have noticed me in the course of my musical life, and for whom I am profoundly grateful:
- My mother, Emmy Morrison, for saving up and getting a piano in the house, noticing when I asked where middle C was, and getting me piano lessons.
- Mary Gladys Benson, for taking me on as a piano student, long after she planned to stop teaching.
- My brother, Emerson Morrison, for steadily encouraging me to practice trumpet.
- Mr. Himes, my sixth-grade band teacher, who labeled me a hot trumpeter way back then.
- Mr. Maulden, my high school band director, who gave me the free lessons that put me on a path to attend the Governor’s School of North Carolina and become a composer.
- The State of North Carolina, Gov. Terry Sanford in particular, for having the vision to bring young people together to study modern developments in their fields, creating the Governor’s School and exposing me to modern music.
- Wilmer Hayden Welsh, who hounded me for not living up to my potential in college.
- Allen Johnson and John Anthony Lennon, for noticing that I had potential as a composer.
- The numerous individuals and ensembles who paid attention to my music, performed it, in particular Duane Schulthess and the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble.
There are many more for whom I am grateful, but the main thing I’m writing about here is the realization of what it means to be noticed. This whole venture – Just Listening, Groundhog Night, the Sound-Energy Aggregate approach to musical analysis – grows from and toward simply paying attention to the contribution of each individual, their point of view, their way of processing what they’ve heard, as valuable to a complete understanding of a musical experience.
From the days of completing my doctorate, when I realized that the music I was coming to deeply understand arose from a period of extraordinary emphasis on hierarchy grounded in colonialism, I have known that the singular emphasis on pitch structure was missing so much of the holistic experience of music. My “course” then, is coming full circle now, bringing forth an analytical method that does not exclude any factor, but rather is founded on the understanding that even the smallest detail can alter experience drastically and is therefore in need of being recognized. And underneath all that is my knowledge that such things are often brought forth by those who are the most humble, the least aggressively putting forth their worldview. Please, let’s notice those people, and help them flourish.