There was incredible energy and power. The sound coming from behind us through the speakers drowned out the roaring crowd of fifteen thousand in front. The mosh pit was in full force at our feet. Bodies, sweat, and dust flying everywhere. It was gross, yes, but electric.
I’d love to say that this was the start of a lifelong career in entertainment. That I spent the next decade living the jet-set lifestyle with bags under my eyes from too many nights spent sleeping on tour-bus couches. I wish I could say you might search my name on the Internet and find an article with the colon title “Where Are They Now?” But you can’t. Because that was the peak of my rock stardom.
At this point in my life, I’m very much okay with the insight that I’m not going to ever become a rock star. The only way I’ll appear on the cover of Rolling Stone is if I leave a copy of it on the dashboard of my car under a photograph of my face on a hot summer afternoon and the two melt together. I’m too scared to get even one tattoo. I don’t want my hair to be pink (though I tried that briefly in high school). And I couldn’t stomach the drugs and alcohol anyway. I’m at a different place in life now, and the door to real rock fame has closed for me.
But one Saturday about a year ago, I kicked it back open just a bit. I decided to become a drummer. The challenge I posed for myself was to learn enough that I could lay down a beat for one song and sound sufficiently amazing. Just one song. Just sufficiently amazing. I never wanted to be a lead singer, but I did want to have some shtick in my back pocket that was cooler than my current hobbies. Learning one song on drums, but really learning how to wail on it, was going to be my magnum opus.
For a number of reasons, this was a dumb idea, or at least an unlikely quest, and I knew it from the beginning. For starters, I lived with my infant son, Mattie, and my husband, Pete, in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan that’s smaller than most people’s garage. We couldn’t spare the square footage to set up a proper drum kit. Any extra space was currently housing our reserve diaper supply. We didn’t know if the neighbors had earplugs, and since you don’t knock on other people’s apartment doors here, we couldn’t figure out how to warn them that they would likely need some. This was a goal doomed to fail. Or get us evicted.
And then there was my drumming IQ. Woodwind adventures in my youth notwithstanding, I didn’t know the difference between a tom-tom (it’s a drum) and a tam-tam (and that’s a Chinese gong). I didn’t realize that you step on the pedal to make the hi-hat quiet down, or that when a drummer referred to the “bell,” they probably meant the dome at the center of a cymbal and weren’t asking for more of the kind that hangs around a cow’s neck in Switzerland. Oh, and it’s a “throne,” not a seat.
I’m also not particularly coordinated. I can’t rub my belly and pat my head at the same time. I fell off the balance beam more than I stayed on it when I tried gymnastics. I wasn’t invited to play the second season of basketball in fourth grade because I tripped over my own feet, fell into my teammate, and knocked us both out of bounds when she had the ball. My inadequacy with a pair of drumsticks would be the obvious and first of many places where this plan would fail.
So why decide to learn drums? My reasoning is as old as motherhood itself.
When I started this adventure, Mattie was four months old and the moments of quiet and calm in my life were short-lived and only sporadically found. On most days, the ratio of time spent grooming Mattie versus myself was easily five to one. For a wash, he required the bathroom to first be transformed into a steam room, his towel pre-warmed in the kitchen oven we no longer had time to use for cooking. I couldn’t remember a time since he’d joined our club when my own elusive showers lasted longer than six minutes. Likewise, what I would accomplish in a day was now dictated by my mini-me, who couldn’t care less about yearly performance appraisals or eating meals at a table. I did most of my work while sitting at a 45-degree angle, which through trial and error I computed as the balance point where I could both see my laptop’s screen and hold sleeping Mattie on my chest without him sliding off onto the floor as I typed around him.
I fully realize that there’s nothing new or different about my struggle relative to the challenges every other parent before me has faced. It’s just that now I was experiencing them firsthand. My problem: The slice of life’s pie that was cut just for me was ever-shrinking. My solution: Set a goal that was just for myself. This exercise in taking time for a personal challenge—learning to play the drums—would be a fun, new, and strange journey for me and my brain.
To be honest, this goal was also a little bit about our son. Mattie hadn’t seen the close of two seasons yet, but Pete and I both wanted to instill a love of music in him as soon as possible, or at least before the end of the critical period for rhythmic development, after which he might always be that guy who clapped when everyone else’s hands were silent between beats. I had just read a study conducted by a group of Canadian psychologists who found that six-month-old infants could learn some fundamentals of music. But interestingly, parental involvement was key to their success. By a flip of the coin, researchers asked some parents to sing lullabies and nursery rhymes to their babies once a week for an hour in class and to listen to recordings of the songs at home. The researchers asked other families to play games, make art as a family, and read books while music played in the background. All the parents in the study cared equally about their children’s education and were actively engaged in enriching their daily experiences. The only difference was that the first group of babies heard their parents singing along to the music while the second group heard only the recordings in the background.
Around the time the kids turned one year of age, the researchers tested their musical skills. They selected eight measures from a piece of music that none of the kids had heard before—a sonatina by Thomas Attwood—and altered every other note in the melody by just a half-step. This was a slight change, but one that had a big impact on how the piece sounded. The transformed snippet seemed dissonant, and a bit off from the type of harmonic structure that appears most often in music written by Bach or Mozart, or in common lullabies—the type of music all the children had been listening to.
The researchers found that the children paid more attention to the music their parents were making as compared to the altered sonatina. But this single difference meant many things. First off, the kids whose parents were involved in their musical training at six months of age could tell the difference between these two different types of harmony. That kids can develop a musical ear so early in life is pretty remarkable, I came to believe. When I turned on the stereo at home, it seemed to me that Mattie thought John Coltrane’s 1965 recording of “My Favorite Things” live in Belgium with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones was no more fascinating than the synthesized rendition of Rossini’s finale to the William Tell Overture that played from the plastic star hanging from his jungle gym when he kicked it. We had work to do.