A Recipe for Music
How I learned the art of cooking from the art of music
I learned how to “cook” ramen noodles from my mother when I was 11. She also taught me how to make a cup of tea. I didn’t think I’d need more than noodles and tea to keep me going so for the next decade, so I maintained in public that I knew cooking well enough to support myself if the need arose.
While I became a master at the art of instant noodles, so much so that people used to commend me on my skill, I had grown dissatisfied with my limited abilities. I challenged myself to learn new recipes and cook for anyone when I got the chance.
Honestly, I didn’t know what I was doing at the start. I was so lost that I didn’t even know what some ingredients in the recipes I read, looked like. Opening our kitchen cupboards, I couldn’t even name everything I saw in there. I thought it’d be a good idea to first learn about basic, commonly used ingredients.
I live in India. I love Indian food (and I’m vegan). So I concentrated most of my efforts in understanding how to eat the food that I eat almost all the time. It took me a while to get a handle on all the spices we use, the vegetables and fruits we prepare our dishes with, and the huge variety of lentils and beans that we use (I love daal). Meanwhile, I kept trying out new recipes. I didn’t really know what to do if I wasn’t following one recipe or the other.
Once I was familiar with the elements, so to speak, I could follow recipes much better. I tried my hand at a few original creations but they almost always tasted like soup-gone-wrong! Actually, they weren’t truly original but more like small diversions from recipes I had memorised by then. Maybe it was an ingredient or two replaced with something else at random. Perhaps, at a whim, I changed the order in which I added ingredients or I changed the way I was cutting a vegetable. Some changes were harmless enough to leave the dish palatable. Others, not so much. I remember this one time I thought of adding a whole lot of coriander powder to the tadka (a deep-fried mixture of spices) because I loved the taste of coriander powder so much. The dish of beans curry turned out so bitter I had to throw it away after forcing down a few spoonfuls.
Yes. These bitter experiences taught me that balance was an important element of cooking. More significantly, I came to realise that I had ignored a potent art form my whole life. What a painting is to your eyes and music is to your ears, food is to your vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch! A lot of people accept this statement partially. They don’t think that hearing applies to food. Think about this: how do you already know how crisp your lettuce or fries are before even putting them in your mouth? You can feel it with your fingers — agreed. But even if your friend were to split your lettuce in half at a distance, you’d know how crisp it was just by the sound. You’re even constantly hearing food being chewed inside your mouth.
Five senses that we’re using to judge a dish, no less. For that matter, there’s other senses like temperature differentiation that we apply to all the food we eat. In all probability, there are more senses that I’m overlooking. The sensory sensitivity and scope we have when it comes to food is overwhelming. And it’s food — something we consume everyday (I hope) to keep us alive! With this mindset, I tried to understand recipes instead of just blindly copying them. I took directions to be guidelines, not rule of law. Improvisation was key.
Still, I didn’t become the master chef I was hoping to be. Apart from the odd miracle, I still didn’t like what I was cooking.
Fortunately, I had some experience with another art form: music. I looked back on my first few months learning to play the guitar. How difficult was it? How much of an idea did I have about what I was doing? What did I do that helped me get better?
My years of experimenting with the guitar had taught me that I had to find the real problem and not focus on the symptom. I had started learning the guitar focusing on the instrument but not on the music itself. It took me a year to understand my folly but once I did, I tried to shift my focus onto the sound. I began to perceive the guitar as an instrument that was there to help me bring out the underlying music. My progress was exponential with this approach. Not only did I develop a better sync with the guitar, but my musical ability skyrocketed as well, which would help me with the many instruments I picked up in the years to come.
I had to do the same thing when it came to cooking! It was the obvious thing to do. Over the course of the next few months, from thinking of ingredients and cooking methods as names in a recipe, I began to imagine the sight, sound, taste, smell and texture that each would bring into the dish (not to mention temperature). Just like music, it was extremely hard to pull off at first. Sight and sound were easy enough for me. I struggled with texture a lot and even to this day, it’s not my strong point. The intention to do it though, was the important thing and I became more skilled with time. The added awareness let me predict what the final result would feel like to my senses as a whole.
With time, practice and the subjection of volunteers to my creations, I came to realise that for most of my life, I had regarded food as only something to shovel down my throat. My underdeveloped awareness in the past was a barrier to experiencing a thing that keeps me alive. When I had begun to explore cooking some months earlier, I started out by looking for exotic ingredients, rare novelties and anything I might find intriguing within my budget. I made the classic rookie mistake of going for variety and width. Once I changed my ways, I saw how seeking depth is more rewarding in the long run, like I had experienced with music too.
This brings me to the inspiration for this post — about how any of this applies to music.
Going back to my initial months with the guitar, I used guitar tabs a lot. For the uninitiated, guitar tabs are fretboard diagrams that show you which frets to hold and for how long, enabling you to play any song by sight. The more expansive traditional sheet music is a sophisticated system for notating the music and is almost independent of the interface of any particular instrument. There are many, many ways to notate music. When I say “traditional sheet music” I’m referring to the common musical staff with five lines and when I say “sheet music” I’m talking about all types of music notation. Tabs, once notated into traditional sheet music can be played on any instrument while a cellist might find it a major inconvenience to follow a guitar tab while playing the cello. Sheet music in general is a visual aid for the performer to understand parts of the music that he’s unable to figure out by ear and also to give him useful directions at specific points in the music, like dynamics and articulation. They’re also great memory aids.
The first two songs I had played from start to finish on the guitar, I hadn’t figured out by ear. I’ve mentioned both of them in my rhythm series: Carnival of Rust (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1) and Hotel California (Part 2). I took what I consider to be the easy route, and easy for good reason. When you listen to a song and have the ability to play it by ear without any other aid, you possess two very important skills. One is to to know exactly what you’re listening to and understand it independently of any instrument. Secondly, you know exactly how to get the same sounds that are in your head out into the world through your instrument.
These skills with sound and instrument let you reconstruct anything you listen to and play it back almost instinctively. Making changes and adding parts on-the-fly becomes very easy too. After a point, hardly any thought goes into it, like driving. You hit the accelerator or the brake instinctively without thinking through each step.
The ability to play by ear involves skill — and skill takes times to develop. Years, in most cases. When you don’t have the skill right away, you might be tempted to go the easy route and try an alternate path that doesn’t necessarily attack the problem but only bypasses the symptom. This is what I did when I used tabs. In an unthinking, unfeeling way, I obediently took directions and performed actions that were given to me in the hope of playing a song with less effort. The little effort I did put in was entirely misdirected.
It’s simple. If you need a crutch, use one. If you don’t, don’t use one. And if you’re bent on using one no matter what, then always remember that it’s a crutch. If you didn’t need it to begin with, you don’t need it once you’ve learned to walk. What I did after a year of being on crutches is realise that I never needed them in the first place; and to learn how to walk without them, I had to throw them away, take the fall and learn how to crawl first.
I stopped using tabs completely. Instead I listened to songs multiple times, going over difficult sections again and again until I could hear and understand what was being played. The right way is often simple and demanding. It was no different with this. Slowly, I began to develop a connection with the guitar. I became familiar with the fretboard and could better predict the pitch at each fret. I could control the guitar’s sound better as I went along and soon enough, I could play songs by ear. Well, not all songs, obviously. There’s always something challenging no matter what your current skill. The point is — the method worked.
Tabs aren’t bad. I just used them the wrong way. In fact, they are very useful depending on the situation. If I need to learn something in a day and I can’t figure it out even after a couple of hundred listens, I would use tablature to help me. That kind of situation though, has occurred only 5 or 6 times in the last 9 years. Quite the rarity!
The reason sheet music is so great is because it allows us to communicate music in written form through generations or across physical locations. Instead of having an audio recording of all music, we have something very handy we can quickly read and know what the music is all about. Yes, that requires some skill but musicians are all about skill right? Even with today’s technology, sheet music is widely used because it is lightweight, compact and convenient, apart from the ability to read sheet music being a valued skill, at least in western music.
Sheet music is great for creating and maintaining traditions. Someone creates something and records it. This is picked up by someone else who then expands on it by adding something of their own. In no time, a rich and vibrant tradition is born that gets carried through the ages to become a behemoth of knowledge and experience.
Now that I think about, this isn’t just about music in some recorded form like writing or audio. Even in oral traditions like Indian classical music, the students and teachers are themselves living examples of recorded music. If a teacher chooses to only give rigid directions and nothing else, the student is left with no choice but to learn like an automaton (the way I was blindly following recipes); but fortunately, most teachers teach using guidelines and personalised advice for each student that can bend and flex to almost any degree while still keeping to the essence of the tradition (like my guru does with me). Students learn like this and add their own elements to the mix. This makes Indian classical music a living tradition.
This is true when it comes to cooking too. You can think of cuisines as traditions that are passed down through the generations and the community. Each person and family adds its own variance and style but it always seems to flow from the predominant, shared cuisine.
And now, my final point.
In the realm of cooking, we have recipes. Recipes are tabs for food. When we don’t understand how to prepare something, we use a recipe. When we want to make something new, we look up recipes. When we want our kids to know how to prepare food the way we do, we hand them a recipe.
The responsibility, I feel, lies with the receiver on how to interpret the directions, be it a recipe or a tab. If the willing student reads the directions and experiments with it, trying to approach it in many ways to understand why the directions are the way they are, then she will have a far better grasp of the elements. She will know the effect of any change, however small and will be able to direct the experience instead of only reacting to it. As a plus, she will also be more receptive to new ideas from others because she’d see the possibility of there being more than one way.
The bigger point I’m trying to make here is about creativity and inventiveness. Coming up with our own dishes and songs requires skill with our senses. We need to be aware of what we are perceiving and commit these perceptions to memory. Once we have absorbed the fundamentals that guide the experience along, we can mix-and-match with a desired goal in mind. We can go from nervously tasting the dish at the end to see if we’ve executed the recipe correctly, to making creative choices and serving the dish confidently before even tasting it. We can stop fidgeting with our instruments while constantly looking up to see what note to play next, to playing music that expresses ourselves.
Blindly following directions dulls the blade of creativity. Unsheathe your original insight and come up with something that you understand through your senses fully well. It’s alright to go slow. If you increase your depth, the variety will take care of itself.
If you were to eat one single grape (yes, a grape) and concentrate on nothing else but the process — meditate on it even, you’d be a step closer to truly experiencing it. You would understand things about it that nobody could ever explain to you in words. The colour of the grape, it’s shape, texture, the feeling in your fingers as you hold it, the burst of taste as you split it open inside your mouth, the sound it makes as you chew on it, the smell of it that changes whether you’re breathing in our out, the feeling as you swallow it, the lingering aftertaste — all these facets are part of your experience, and only yours. That’s the entire point. It’s not about the grape. It’s about you. My description only contains words, not the actual experience.
To the musicians reading, you can try the same with one single note. Listen to it like it’s the first note you’ve ever heard and slowly you’ll begin to uncover facets, some of which you might never be able to verbalise. What images does it conjure? Does the note have a specific voice? Does it wobble? Is it bright? Dull? Does it move in a certain way? There are so many more things but I don’t quite know how to describe them in words. Try finding your own set of perceptions to discover more.
This kind of awareness will help you when you want to apply your creativity. You will understand function and context with an unmatched intensity and be able to use this to communicate.
When it comes to things like food, movies and music, I think the best way to communicate your experience is through the same senses you have used to perceive it. Like the 5 blind men trying to understand the concept of an elephant (by feeling different parts of its body and announcing that the elephant is like whatever part of the body they examined), it is difficult to translate one sense to another because of the inherently incomplete picture you would get. Even if one blind man went all over the elephant, he’d still be amazed by the sight of the elephant if his vision were somehow restored.
Essentially, the best way to share your insight is through the very same medium you used to perceive it. So the best way to communicate your understanding of a note is through your own musical composition that brings out this understanding sonically. Your best bet at explaining your discoveries in the world of taste would be by preparing food that tastes a specific way so that your understanding of taste is conveyed. In this sense, art is about sharing our perception of the world with others. We can, in turn, experience the world through another’s senses.
For you to be able to share an experience so intimate and so personal through the medium of one of the senses, and also create something that showcases this understanding, you need a deep connection with your senses coupled with a burst of creativity. And that is how I would describe the true artist.
But don’t take my word for it. Experience their art and know this for yourself.
_/\_
Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.
Follow my 4-part series on rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) to read about my journey through the world of rhythm. As an added benefit, you can improve your sense of rhythm too :)
