Stone Riley's Blog: Stone Riley's Shoebox - Posts Tagged "harmonica"

I want an art teacher to review my book.

But why an art teacher? Why is that the ace qualification on my list? Because this book is outside the scope of things people are currently familiar with and very beautiful; pretty much the situation an art teacher faces constantly. Me recently for instance; for little children in our family, I am their first art teacher and I am currently introducing an 18 month old grandchild to the piano in his living room even though I do not play the instrument myself.

Thanks largely to advice from a flutist friend recently on a different problem, our little piano lessons are going well. We don't meet often, the flutist and I, but this was at the memorial service for a very beautiful person who had led a very beautiful life and I had read a poem that is in this book. After, at the meal, this fine musician let me know the poem had been beautiful. So I gave a copy of the book and ventured to ask for the advice which has proved useful.

You understand, I asked the advice on a different topic: my fledgling project to invent experimental music on harmonica. (Harmonica is actually, although not mechanically, a kind of flute.) With this profoundly personal motivation, I asked how to take my project farther, how to put the pieces of the music I have found together. The musician told me I ought to do this: compose a poem with it. And that has served us well, the child and I, in our piano lessons.

Why an art teacher? Because experimental art needs a teacher to explain it. In fact – quite perplexingly to me – nearly never has anyone dared write a review of my work, the one exception so far being a high school literature teacher friend for whose students I did a talk on Homer, after which she felt indebted. And her review taught me things about my work.

Our little piano lessons are doing like that talk on Homer did, like the funeral poem reading did, like the weekend art shows in the park (in the years when I was showing paintings) did and like the stage and museum work and all the rest has done whenever it was going well: You play duets.

You converse with people. You talk with people from your heart so they open theirs, and so the natural art of human beings makes a poem. That is how I learned to write and paint and all the rest. That is how a proper teacher works. That is how I hope you feel when you read the book and when you tell about it.

So perhaps you are an art teacher.