Is there something unique about the experience of playing music with other people? Is there a deep philosophical and moral lesson to be learned from just banging on some drums with a few friends? I want to say ‘yes.’
I’m currently playing caixa (snare drum) in a samba ensemble led by a talented Brazilian musician and academic visiting the United States for a semester. She studied in the oldest samba school in Porto Alegre for three years before beginning to teach samba ensembles at a local college. Here, our ensemble is made up of several music students, musicologists, and other people from the community. And what she stresses is that samba’s main lesson comes from playing together. The music only works when we listen not to our own parts, but those of everyone else. When that happens, when in sync with other people, there is a feeling of unity, and it is this feeling that drove her to want to teach samba to others.
For anyone who has never had the experience of playing music intensely with other people it is quite easy to describe, whether you believe my description or not. In essence, in the process of really ‘grooving’ with other people, in really getting what you’re playing in sync with what they’re playing, the normal self-awareness which we often call ‘consciousness’ falls away and you become one with all the others. Or, to more precisely describe the experience, all awareness of self and other disappears – one simply is with others, there is no perceived distinction. All that exists in the moment is the music. One literally has the sensation that one has become the music itself. This inevitably comes to an end, often to the mild shock of the individual and the detriment of the music. A sense of ‘where have I been?’ or ‘how much time has passed?’ belies the being-somewhere-else of the experience. But why might this be interesting?
In brief, I feel that in these experiences of the loss of the self we glimpse the being-with others that is always already our mode of being in the world. We are not, to contradict Descartes, isolated minds, each our own island. Instead we are only insofar as we are with other people. We think in a language we share with other people. We conceive of ourselves in relation to others. Our world is populated largely by those close to us. The world is not of our creation, but handed to us by others already filled with meaning. And I believe that this ecstatic experience one can have while playing with other people shows us that our being is always together with other people. By presenting an extreme version of our everyday being in the world, playing together shows us the world for what it is, and can help us be better people. At least, that’s what I hope.
So, if you can, find someone to play some music with. Join a local ensemble. Look for a choir or a percussion group in your area and see if you don’t then see the world differently: one, and not many.
