Reflection on Being In Tune

Even since I was little, I’ve never found “out-of-tune” music to be unpleasant. Maybe I was unknowingly exposed to non-western tunings on the radio in Singapore as a kid or something. Some of the music that plays during Ramadhan could certainly fit that description. At a certain point in my musical study (and it was quite late) I had to learn how to play in a way that other people considered ‘in tune’ although I myself personally didn’t really care. It felt very social to me, like I was learning a particular kind of polite behaviour that would make other people comfortable.

Nowadays I do a lot of teaching and whenever I teach beginners, we have to talk about tuning the bass. I find myself frequently explaining that the closer to being in tune a string gets, the harder it is to tell whether it is sharp or flat, yet the more jarring it feels. Maybe I’m just not that disturbed by things feeling jarring. A lot of things in life feel jarring.

And speaking of being In Tune, I love that first track of Black Radio III – “once we’re in tune, we can conduct the cosmos!” – maybe I’ve never really been in tune for most of my life. Which is not exactly the same as not being myself, although that is its own struggle. But sometimes I’m myself and I’m still not in tune. And the reason I’m writing this now is because I recently had an experience where I found it so jarring how I wasn’t myself.

It was one of those social situations where I just found myself performing ‘good’ behaviour. Which ends up looking like me not saying much, not sharing much, just kind of looking in the direction of whoever’s talking, and being a little anxious in general. This happens to me a lot, as I’m sure it does to others, but it was particularly jarring that evening. I think that’s a good sign, because it means that I must be closer to being in tune than I ever have, which must be why the experience of noticing the discrepancy suddenly becomes so alarming. But it will probably be difficult to tell if I’m sharp or flat.

I have a new project coming up where I’ve done a lot of recording my bass solo at home. I did my best to play honestly, and I found myself frequently grappling with the pressure to play ‘in tune’. But at that time, I would say that I was pretty in tune with myself, and I had a strong conviction to ignore the pressure to play ‘in tune’. It just felt like the right thing to do. And I think it sounded right. It doesn’t sound deliberately out of tune, but it sounds imperfect in a way that I think reflects me in an honest and self- compassionate way. I think that’s the best possible outcome.

So what does it mean to be In Tune? I guess I would feel In Tune when my external behaviour matches my internal experience, which it generally does not when I’m performing ‘good’ behaviour. And I don’t believe that I “can’t” control my internal experience, but it’s more that I trust how my internal experience has developed over the course of my life much more than I trust the external pressures I encounter day-to-day that push me to act in a certain way. So I feel that being in tune, for me, will be about navigating those pressures to find a way of behaving externally that truly and fully honours who I am inside (thanks Mulan/Christina Aguilera).

Overall, Music Teaches Me that there is something significant about being In Tune, and that the way I felt recently is a sign that I’m getting really close to it. But I also want the world to understand that being in tune is not some hard and fast law. I’ve lived so much of my life being out of tune and I don’t have a problem with it. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend many years ago about enjoying music played by students / young people who didn’t sound ‘good’ (in a technical way, I guess). I argued that you could enjoy music even when it didn’t sound good, which my friend disagreed with. I still believe that (and I believe in it beyond technical definitions of ‘good’). Let kids play ‘bad’ music. Let the child in your heart play out-of-tune with the pressures of the external world.

Being in tune is not only about making two pitches resonate together. It’s also about making the souls that are actually vibrating those pitches resonate with each other. The pitches themselves are just a bridge. We’ve all heard technically perfect music that bores us, and that’s what it sounds like when this part goes wrong. So if you ask me, it’s better to be out of tune if that preserves who you are, until you can learn to be In Tune without losing who you are even by a fraction of an inch. Which is really, really hard. But the suffering of losing the song in your heart just so you can play the part assigned to you by society is much, much worse.

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If I were to reflect more deeply, I would say this - I have just always, always had to grapple with who I want to be and who people expect me to be. In some ways that’s not at all a unique experience to me and in other ways it’s a singularly unique experience for each person who goes through it.