Music Needs to Breathe. So Do We.

When I introduce a new class to the drum programmer in Garage Band, the most common response is to fill in every box. The students are excited because they’ve made it do something.
They think it sounds cool. But to my ears, it’s a wall of incessant noise.
Because the thing is… music, like life, is better with breathing space.

Melody, in particular, thrives on space. She needs rests to articulate phrases, heighten rhythms and stimulate dynamic punctuation. Rests are also a critical tool for the arranger. Moving the melody from one instrument to another doesn’t just change the texture of the music, it also gives the players actual space to take a decent breath.
A well-written arrangement accommodates this. You see, the thing is, a wind player can’t play all the time.
Well… they can.
But it’s exhausting.

Christmas carols are the best example of this. Most Christmas carol arrangements for concert band simply take the four voice parts and give them to the equivalent instruments. This means the flute and the trumpet get the melody while the tuba only ever gets the bass part. Not only is this boring for the players, it’s exhausting because you don’t just play a Christmas carol once. Many of them have six or seven verses!

If you’re really lucky and there’s more than one player on your part, you can swap verses and take breaks that way. But if not, you’re in for a long and tiring night. Like the trumpeter who’s stuck playing the melody without a break all evening, we too become exhausted if we never stop and rest. Building rests into the arrangement isn’t a sign of weakness.
It’s part of the plan.
It’s what makes the music sustainable.
It’s what makes the music enjoyable.

I’ve spent years trying to optimise my life. Thousands and thousands of dollars. Countless books.
Courses.
Diet plans.
Exercise programs.
Health plans.
Productivity systems.
Always trying to fix myself by adding something else.
Then three weeks ago I got bronchitis.
For the first time in my life, my body simply refused to negotiate.

This weekend, recovering from a relapse, I made homemade chicken soup. It took me two hours to chop the vegetables because I stopped for coffee, lunch, Facebook breaks and several sessions with a very fluffy cat who insisted that I sit down so he could curl up on my lap. We jokingly called it the PurrPod.
Something remarkable happened.
My battery didn’t keep going down. It stayed steady.
For the first time, I realised that rest isn’t what happens after everything else is finished.
Rest is one of the things that makes everything else possible.

As musicians, we understand something that we don’t always apply to our own lives.
A rest is not nothing.
It’s part of the music.
Without rests there is no phrasing.
No contrast.
No breathing.
No room for the melody to shine.
Without rests, music simply becomes noise.

Perhaps our lives are no different.
For years, I filled every available space.
Teaching.
Family.
Housework.
Building a business.
Choir.
Community.
Whenever I found a spare hour, I filled it with another note.
Another task.
Another commitment.
Another thing to do.
Looking back now, I realise I had written a life with almost no rests.

If we don’t play, we won’t hear the melody. But equally, if we never stop playing, we don’t have the opportunity to listen to the other parts. The other people in our lives who love us and want to be part of our song. When we stop and rest, we notice things.
We become present with our children.
We spend time with our partners.
We hear the laughter around the dinner table.
We provide a lap that might just become a PurrPod for one very fluffy cat.

For twenty-three years I’ve been teaching children that music needs to breathe.
It has taken bronchitis, a pot of homemade soup and one very persistent cat to finally teach the music teacher the same lesson.
Music needs to breathe.
So do I.