Learning from Drumming

I try to learn from my own stupidity. I am confident that I have ample opportunity to do so.

Perhaps the most important lesson in life, which I have had to learn repeatedly, is that ignorance applies to itself. What I don't know, I don't know. Socrates was right: the vital piece of self-knowledge is awareness of one's lack of knowledge. When I watch people demonstrate a skill, their ability to fool me into believing it is effortless is itself the supreme expression of that skill.

Last year, I was at a cultural event that featured a taiko drumming intermission. The leader of the troupe, an acknowledged master, invited audience members to try their hand at this Japanese musical art. If you haven't seen it, or rather heard it and felt it, the beat is overwhelming, a percussion that is enveloping, surrounding, suffocating. We went up to the stage, had a thirty-second initiation, and then had to join in the briefest of tunes.

I would bet many of us underestimate drumming. It seems natural, visceral, primitive. We all do it to some extent, such as when we tap our fingers on the desk out of impatience. We malign Ringo Starr as the least of the Beatles. His instrument is said to be the oldest of humankind, a skin stretched to offer a surface to produce sound. It has a distinguished military history, used to signal, inspire, and set the pace for the march.

Well, on this occasion when I was given the substantial drumsticks (bachi) and asked to repeat a simple measure, I failed altogether — so did all the other volunteers. However, I was reminded again of the power of hubris; it's especially easy for anyone who has achieved success in their profession (not that, I hasten to add, I congratulate myself in such a manner) to assume that it also is possible to do other tasks well.

Observation is important to performance. But being astute, accurate, and analytical as a lawyer means nothing for being able to remember or replicate anything with rhythm, much less coordinate with others, as a drummer. Before being given a turn to make noise, we non-drummers likely focused on the wrong aspects of the technique we were witnessing: experts rely as much on their memory as anything else, as they carry out a high-level task. They have internalized their moves.

I was comic as a flop. We all were. That made its own entertainment. Even told explicitly to produce ten beats, we couldn't count it properly; nor with cues, could we start and stop in unison.

On top of that, taiko drumming turns out to be strenuous. I should have been aware of that from the sweat that was worked up by those who knew what they were doing. In their frenetic movement, their perspiration soaked their happi coats.

The late George Plimpton achieved fame as an amateur who joined the New York Philharmonic, among other activities he undertook for which he had no qualifications. His stint touring as a percussionist was the most frightening of his adventures. He confessed to his fear of ruining a work of art. His reporting of these exploits made him famous, because he had a different talent, of writing. His readers were able to feel as if they too had had the same experiences: they did not have come from the same privileged background to revel in the accounts of playing quarterback for a professional football team, sparring against champion boxers, becoming the impresario of a Fourth of July fireworks display, and so on. (His literary journal was a CIA cover operation.)

Without the initiative of Plimpton, I am goaded into appreciation for others. Again and again, I learn my limits in order to challenge them. The newscaster who smiles and talks, looking natural and friendly, as a producer is giving instructions through an earpiece — how easy it is for the viewer to suppose that anyone who could smile and talk can do both simultaneously, reading off a teleprompter. But then one has the opportunity to try it, and it turns out to be a formidable feat simply to smile and talk at once much less say anything of substance.

I welcome these moments. To be humbled is to be human.