I love pasta, especially Linguine. It is not easy to find one in Japan. They mostly sell regular Spaghetti. The difference of course is its shape. Round or a little flat. Since I moved back to Japan many years ago, Spaghetti has been almost only choice I have had. It is great with meaty sauce like Ragu sauce, but I was almost always not satisfied when I cooked pasta with sea food.
The other day, I found Linguine on the internet and was excited to order a few of them, cooked pasta with clams and squid. The taste was wonderful. Is it this tiny difference in shape that makes linguine taste so good with sea food? Maybe I was only happy to taste something I always had back in the days when I was living in the U.S.? I tried hard to examine as objectively as possible, and yes, it did taste better the spaghetti!
Maybe because of its shape, linguine tends to have a “bite-back” feeling that I like, or the flat shape blends better with the liquid from the sea food, I don’t really know. I am no professional in this field, but thought those pastas in so many different shapes must have their purpose.
This experience taught me that our brain collects so much information from so many angles, our tongue, smell, and who knows what. So the taste is something we can never describe with words.
That is so similar to music.
One of the greatest classical pianist, Mr. Daniel Barenboim said “We can never teach music in schools” in one of the YouTube video. It is just like the linguine. The music involves so many aspects that we are not even aware that our brain is proseccing the information from. Not just melody and harmony, or the way the instruments are played but timber and maybe even the air, and again, who knows what.
In school, to those students who only try to look good on the stage, teachers may say, “it is more important how the music sounds, not how you look!”. But if teachers are only thinking music as a compilation of harmony and melody and rhythm, we might be able to say, “those who cares for their look is better”, in a sense that they are trying to reach out to something undescribable.
I have taught music in the institution for 37 years and did a workshop in dozen countries.
I think this unknowness in music is something we all have to give a serious thought even in teaching in the colleges.
Unknown means no answer.
If this is really the core part of music, we, artists, educator, cleary need to search for the new approach in performance and in education.
Otherwise we will be beaten by AI much sooner than we think.