Ripples and resonance

The Piano Performance Places wiki spinoff idea was born because the idea resonated with other pianists. They could have been protective of the limited opportunities to play in the area, but have chosen instead to be generous in sharing information. Mostly because they are all first-rate human beings…but also because the ideas of expanding opportunities for players, increasing the musical offerings in small places, and of finding more localized ways of touring, all spoke to an existing desire.

The Play Every Town tour is showing signs of reverberating beyond my 252 performances in other ways as well. I’m planning what will be our first school concert with a former student who is now the instrumental music instructor there. I invited her and her vocal-music colleague to perform with me in a piece or two. She said good, her students know the she and her co-teacher play and sing, but their students haven’t heard them perform and it was time they should. In another town, the librarian hopes that our performance there will be a catalyst to advance dormant plans to fix up the piano and disused town hall auditorium above the library.

My project is just 252 pebbles dropped in a little pond. They’ll make their small splash, which might even ripple a ways. But those ripples will quickly subside—unless there’s resonance (lit. “sounding again”). If the pebbles drop at the right frequency, the waves will match the pond’s natural reverberance, and if that happens, the results are astonishingly powerful.

This is how I’m learning to think about individual actions to address the climate crisis. Yes, we need drastic, and drastically sudden, changes at a level that can only be effected by government policy. And because our governments have been thoroughly captured by industry, this will require a fundamental change in how we are governed: a revolution. But individual action is still important. Not because “if everyone did that, it would really add up” (there isn’t time for that; it won’t add up fast enough) but because individual actions, if they resonate, can have non-linear impacts. But only if we are vocal about them.