I was in Glasgow yesterday to take part in a whistle workshop for beginners. (Rest assured: absolute beginners.) It was part of the Celtic Connections programme – on for another two weeks with all sorts of delights still in store.
One of the things I took away from the session was the encouragement to drop the attachment to or dependence on sheet music. The trick was not to learn what someone else had written, but to get used to listening to a tune, working out the notes, and then playing it (by heart).
This way you’d be playing a tune not by rote, but from memory. Not a tune that someone else had composed for you, but one that you’d absorbed, and then made your own. The analogy the tutor used was that of the iceberg. You only ‘play’ the top 10%. The rest lies behind the surface.
The rest being: where you heard the tune, who you were with, how you were feeling, what it connects you to or reminds you . The people, the places and the stories that lie underneath.
It made me think that the life stories we write are also the 10% above the surface. The parts we select, celebrate, highlight, choose to remember. There’s so much more that lies beneath the surface. It needs to be sifted and sorted, it can’t all be above the water line… but the story can’t be written without the bigger story that lies underneath.
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