Making things as a social exercise
Published on 2025-05-23
I was a band kid in high school. I don't know if I really thought of myself as a band kid at the time, because I didn't really hang out with anyone in band, but I was nominally in band. I mostly didn't enjoy it. I found it really humiliating. Even though our conductor was a pretty nice guy I had this impression that concert band was this incredibly oppressive thing, this place where failure was met with ridicule. The people who took it seriously took it way too seriously. And it probably didn't help that our school's band was small, under-funded and lacked any sort of practice discipline. The people who didn't take it seriously enough made it difficult to pull the pieces together. Whenever we went to competitions, the school across the river would wipe the floor with us.
During the lock-down, however, I made a commitment with myself to practice for an hour every day. I noticed that the sheet music we were using included a link to unlisted videos on YouTube that featured a professional concert band performing the pieces, and so I started playing along with them. For the first time ever, I suppose, I was hearing my part in the context of the piece the way it was supposed to sound; or at least, I was able to see the bigger picture, and it became a lot clearer where I had to improve.
We maybe got to practice altogether once during the lock-down, but nonetheless, that might have been the first and only time I'd ever come to band practice feeling confident.
I've played instruments on and off for pretty much my whole life. My father is a guitar teacher, and he started me pretty young. Looking back on it that might have been the only period of time playing an instrument really felt like it "worked" for me. And it was kind of an interesting personal development, as someone who always felt reclusive, or like an outsider in any group (I wonder why that might have been): clearly there was something about playing music with others that worked for me, even if playing in that concert band really didn't.
Recently I've started playing music again with some sort of regularity for the first time in a long time, and I find myself longing for that experience. I haven't played music with others in four years; any attempts I've made sense have been entirely solitary exercises. I've been thinking a lot about what it is exactly that I'm looking for, and I think it has a lot of tie-ins with the way I think about life more broadly.
I don't listen to jazz music as much as I used to, but I still love watching jazz performers play. Even if I don't particularly like what they're playing, it's so fun to see the way they interact with each other musically. Every time they're creating something totally new, building off of each other, supporting each other. Since I don't like the "totalitarianism" of a concert band I'd probably feel a lot more comfortable jamming with friends, and probably to the same effect.
It's a similar feeling I got at my last job, and my first job in software development. For most intensive purposes it was probably the prototypical job for which you employ software development interns: you have a codebase and you want to make incremental improvements to it. Every day you get together for stand-up to talk about what you've done, what you plan to do. There were many parts of the job that felt reclusive, but I noticed a few months in I managed to identify one or two people who took their work seriously, who cared more about their craft than their "velocity" or LOC-count. Working with those people could genuinely be fun.
At my current job, for the last year I've worked almost entirely on my own, but the other month that changed. I'm working directly with another software developer, making specific technical decisions with them, and I'm starting to get that feeling again. It's not just that there's a shared vision of the outcome; there's also a shared vision of it's process and execution.
Really, it's the difference between creating something and collaborating on something. There's something lost when the labour is atomized, or when it's entirely self-fulfilling.
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