A MUSICIAN’S PERSPECTIVE

One morning in mid-April I settled in the living room of my Flatbush apartment and put on Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel’s webinar, entitled Love, Loss, Loneliness and a Pinch of Humor! In those dark and mortal months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a near-constant presence of ambulances speeding down my Brooklyn street. I am a touring musician and was beginning to lose all of my touring work for 2020. When I finally saw the final cancellations roll through my inbox, I was existing mostly alone; my long-term boyfriend had driven to Baltimore in the early days of the pandemic to care for his young niece whose daycare had been cancelled. I was wrestling with what Dr. Pauline Boss calls ‘ambiguous loss’; a type of loss that occurs without a definitive end. Time seemed to stretch on at slow and plodding gait; I often oscillated between total dissociation and existential panic.

Though I had the overwhelming sense that I was floundering, Perel pulled me up for air with one interesting thought. “They’re going to call this moment in time The Great Adaptation,” she stated. Her assurances were comforting, like someone finally had the guts to sit me down and give me the tea. Perhaps I wasn’t going to thrive, but I could at least adapt.

Since then I have reflected a lot over this concept of adaptation, feeling so much respect and empathy for those who have had to adapt the most. Educators are among the first to come to mind, though for teachers working through the COVID-19 pandemic, adaptation seemed not so much a choice as it was a Sisyphean job requirement. In Farhad Manjoo’s recent New York Times opinion piece “Please Don’t Call Them Heroes” he very aptly warns that in America, when politicians start calling teachers heroes, they’re “buttering you up before sacrificing you to the gods of unconstrained capitalism and governmental neglect”. With Autumn currently looming and no proper safety measures in place, Manjoo writes that teachers are being publicly valorized for a job that should definitively not require them to put their lives on the line.

In our current world, having to swiftly adapt one’s career under Western capitalism brings up so many parallels between musicians (practitioners) and educators. Most of us enter music performance and music education fields not expressly for the money but because we want to have a positive impact in our communities. In both professions we wear multiple hats and often juggle disparate jobs. Lauren Gardener, an 8th grade teacher in New York City schools, described her teaching-under-quarantine experience to Vox Media’s Sean Rameswaram as: “having to be a film editor, a solicitor calling people’s houses, a graphic designer and a YouTube actor.” When I was touring prior to the pandemic, I’d have described my career of “touring musician” as having to be a writer, project coordinator, accountant, travel agent, co-pilot, ship captain and performer—and even at that, I had great colleagues (booking agents, a manager) to help manage this workload. 

I have collaborated with teachers in the past (notably through Savannah Music Festival’s incredible Musical Explorers program) and have been a visiting artist in elementary through to high schools. Despite the skillset overlap between practitioners and educators, I’ve had a few heartbreaking interactions with music teachers who do not see themselves as “real” musicians. This chasm between who gets to claim the title of musician and who doesn’t is a state of mind that needs reframing.

The image of the “real” musician is, in and of itself, a construct. If you can play or sing, you are a musician. People who decide to monetize this skill set through performance or recording are simply folks who earn a living through music. I’d go so far as to argue that many “real” musicians in my millennial generation are able to gig because they have a certain social safety net and economic privilege to fall back on, usually through their parents. I’ve known many incredibly talented musicians who have made their living by other means. I attended college in Elkins West Virginia (Massawomeck and Calicuas territory) on a banjo performance scholarship. There were many residents in the area who could play me under the table but who chose not to pursue music professionally. I’d like to banish the idea that one needs to win an orchestra job or play in venues and clubs in order to be considered a “real” musician.

As much as there are similarities between practitioners and educators, I wonder sometimes if educators can become disconnected from the vulnerability of creation. Much of music education is necessarily rooted in mechanics and execution. However, I’d argue that if educators can foster a space to be creatively vulnerable and non judgmental of themselves, the more their students will feel comfortable exploring their own interests and cultivating their own modes of artistic expression. The visiting artist model has long been the norm, but this can also look like finding some beats or a melody track online and having students put freeform lyrics to it, or (depending on age group) asking students to pick their favourite song and describe why it functions well harmonically or lyrically. When I went to school I was studying Bach in orchestra and listening to Jill Scott on my walks home. I would have loved if a teacher encouraged me to bring in my more contemporary interests to the classroom.

While it would wonderful for educators to dedicate class time for the humanities and creation side of music, it is also important to talk about the idea of ‘failure’ with students when you work with them in a creative medium. The caustic fear of failure was something that teachers often wielded against me when I was in school—if I failed a class then it was my fault, and I felt inherently like a bad person. The reality was that I was trying to figure out how to grow and learn and be responsible. Yet for most professors who shamed me, the metric for success was compliance at all costs. This was pathologized in me; I’m now a recovering perfectionist, but I still falter sometimes. The pass/fail binary has many students concerned about what the right answer is—and the ultimate truth is that in songwriting there is no right answer, just a plethora of choices and your own gut. There is a chance that this may shut some students down right off the bat, so leading a conversation around failure being a part of creative endeavours is a good way to introduce the topic. 

My eighth grade English teacher, Ms. Sweeney, was one of the first people to tell me I was a good writer. She always wrote honest critical feedback in my creative writing assignments. One month I I diverged from the reading list and asked if I could present my book report on The Autobiography of Malcolm X—to my slight surprise, she supported it. I was so excited to tell my classmates about this book that I brought in the double VHS tape of the 1992 biopic of the same name and proceeded to fast forward through the movie like some kind of scene anthropologist. I was a biracial young girl living in Canada and didn’t have very much confidence in myself at that age. Yet her belief in me kept the thought at the back of my mind that I’d write creatively. Songs were the form I ended up using and I still think of her class often. 

So much of decolonizing the environments around us requires us to learn and unlearn histories, listen more than we talk, and ultimately try to use the knowledge we’ve gained to foster better spaces for our communities and ourselves. As an artist I often have audiences I can mobilize and educate through recordings and live performance. My most recent 2018 album Grenades explores my father’s refugee experience in Canada after the United States military’s invasion of his home country of Grenada in 1983. There’s a lot of pain in my family’s past, but every time I bring Grenades to a new audience I can heal a little more. Teachers can have this impact on an exponential scale by imbuing their students with the confidence and self-compassion it takes to be a confident, silly, fallible and creative human in this rapidly changing world.

Montreal-born Grenadian-Canadian Kaia’s jazz-fueled voice and deft songcraft have garnered acclaim from NPR, CBC, Rolling Stone and No Depression. Her 2016 release 'Nine Pin' earned a Canadian Folk Music Award, sending her on 18-months of touring from Ireland to Illinois. Her new album 'Grenades' explores themes of migration and belonging and has been nominated for a 2019 JUNO award and long-listed for the Polaris Music Prize.