Naming It T.L. Mazumdar / EveryNowHere |
Contents
One of my earliest memories of formal music study is a baffling sense of not understanding something I could feel.
Music theory vs music reality.
Picture a winter morning in the basement of a building in the Black Forest in Germany with a room full of 20-somethings hungover from the weekend, in their first Music Theory/Ear Training course, wondering how something that had the word 'music' in it could feel so unfamiliar.
Yours truly had the added embarrassment of almost 4 years of actual professional experience by then, making real money playing and composing music, as I sat in that room, struggling to find my place inside the world of formal, 'conservatory' music education.
Ear training came so easily to one part of me and excruciatingly elusive to another.
When it was my turn, I'd sing the notes back immaculately with my model-immigrant smiley face, as I felt the sweat trickling down my neck in sub zero temperatures, my mind rushing to apprehend the question I knew was about to follow.
'Can you name it?'
I made sure I wore extra layers to absorb all the sweat as I tried to win that race against imposter syndrome, killing it in jam sessions and stage performances while befuddling my teachers with my dismal knowledge of so many things they considered 'the basics'.
It's not like I couldn't hear what was being played.
Being a singer and pianist were pretty much the best cards you could possibly have in that class. But identifying the space it occupied within this whole new framework with a name? Whole different story.
Whatever one part of my brain recognised, heard and sang effortlessly, seemed to operate independently of another that fought to build a whole new world of nomenclature and rules that made me feel like my head would burst on some days.
We had kind teachers in that class.
They gave us hacks which I did my best to pretend I didn't really need.
Remembering songs we knew as orientation.
First 2 notes of 'Für Elise' = minor 2nd
First 2 notes of 'Smoke on the Water' = minor 3rd
First 2 notes of 'The Simpsons' = tritone
And so on and so forth.
Over the months that followed, as Beethoven, Ritchie Blackmore and Bart Simpson played the strangest games inside my head, my ears started to relax. My mind made new connections between felt senses and a way to name them. Absorbing the reality of how the particular vibration and frequency two specific notes induce had a universal name, no matter what the song.
It was pretty friggin beautiful. So beautiful that by the end of the year, I'd become the klugscheisser, scoring top points with a whole new swag to boot, even as my dyslexia left me hanging for most of my sight-reading (different story).
But music theory and ear training? I was the new jack in town.
(Ahem.)
All because I had simply learned to name things.
Which, strangely enough, meant I could eventually recognise the same thing somewhere else. And didn't need Bart, Ritchie and Ludwig roughing it out in the boxing ring between my ears anymore.
I've been thinking about this a lot in recent months.
When my tour got cancelled in January, I knew a year and a half of planning down the drain was going to need some serious overcompensating. So I thought I'd go overtime with all the nerdiness I could dive into. And then the binging began. On a very different, but similar body of theory used to name things.
Not notes, but something that comes before.
Behaviour.
Just in the last two weeks alone, I finished an IFS (Internal Family Systems)-informed Somatic Therapy Coach certification and a diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Partly because of my own years in and out of therapy. Partly due to the parallels between music and the human psyche I couldn't dismiss anymore. But mostly because I'm increasingly intent on figuring out what this has to do with being an artist.
I've come to the conclusion that psychology is like advanced music theory for the composer. Even more so as a songwriter. Discovering a name for a specific feeling comes with an equally specific cascade of realisations.
Let's take a few examples.
Anxiety
Anxiety as a thing is something I knew long before I knew what it was called.
The way it felt. What it did to my body. How it affected behaviour. Arms crossed. Nervous smiles. Random topics with comical smartassery thrown in, hoping it would distract whoever was in front of me from my inner sitcom.
Over time, I'd built an entire repertoire around its appearances, learning when to turn up the volume, when to change the subject, and when to disguise the dissonance as something resembling politeness.
But beginning to understand its architecture, tracing the patterns beneath the performance, and eventually learning what to do with what I discovered through years of therapy have reminded me of those early Monday mornings in the Black Forest.
The peculiar relief of finding a name for something I'd been hearing all along. That unfamiliar confidence of finally understanding what had previously been left to instinct, improvisation and a fair amount of guesswork.
And suddenly, the most banal of realisations acquired an entirely different dimension.
Familiarity is not the same as understanding.
Inadequacy
Some of the names we come across once we're on a roll can be harder to swallow than others.
Inadequacy, for example.
It's one thing to carry a feeling of not being enough (raises hand) and quite another to understand and admit that is what the feeling actually is.
What follows are a series of light-bulb moments about the ways in which it shows up in our life, and adaptations we have made to compensate for it.
And if we keep digging, a whole new world of options we never considered existed, start to open up as we find ourselves wondering what life might be like in the absence of the paper tigers we have been running from most of our lives.
Projection and Emotional Management
This is a trickier one and it took me a while. A close cousin of 'people pleasing', on the outside it could look remarkably similar to 'care' or 'compromise'. 'Concern'.
But the reality underneath is often different. Truth is, certain interactions trigger the mind in ways that threaten to rob us of the capacity to pause and ask why, as we wonder how it all acquired so much emotional charge in hindsight.
Another human being is the perfect screen for the subconscious mind to project its shadows onto, and often a welcome alternative to examining the same within instead. On some days, it can tangle further by trying to manage someone else's emotions in wobbly attempts to control an outcome we don't have any say over, anxious about feeling 'exposed' in ones we fear we aren't equipped to handle.
So I'd anticipate. Accommodate. Then explain. Try my best to make sure nobody was upset or make sure I had a good reason to declare if they were, as I adjusted and edited away.
Somewhere underneath it all was a perfectly justifiable need to protect myself, dressed up as a sincere attempt to 'not hurt someone else's feelings'.
Reprise
Studying all the theory about how the spaces between two notes didn't always have to feel comfortable or 'nice' to make music, raised a much less flattering question.
At what point does trying to understand the mechanics of that interplay blur into a boring theory exercise that has very little to do with anything outside the walls of a music theory lesson?
When do notes actually become music? And how do we learn that intricacy without sounding like we're trying to 'manage' it, but are just playing a song?
When does using information run the risk of mutating into attempts to control or worse still, manipulate our environment and the people in it?
That's not an easy set of notes to sit with. Neither is recognising how easily we can move from feeling something, acting upon it and imposing it on others or ourselves.
How the listener and performer, student and teacher, observer and observed, resonance and dissonance and even victim and perpetrator can be part of the same ecosystem, and not the clean, separated categories we'd prefer them to occupy.
None of these names created the thing they describe.
That's the bit I keep coming back to.
Naming the interval doesn't create it.
It was already there.
Calling anxiety and the likes by their name didn't create them either.
They were already there.
But the boundary I was frightened to draw was there too, and naming them all simply made it considerably harder to dismiss. The notes or the songs didn't disappear, but the process helped me realise that this wasn't the end of the road, just the beginning of another kind of listening.
And so to this day, Für Elise remains etched into my memory with the rest of those songs so I can use the notes in ones that have nothing to do with them anymore.
And all the psychological and somatic nerdiness is not collecting lingo, 'diagnosing' myself or people around me, and certainly not acquiring sophisticated artillery to explain my presence unapologetically and completely.
To be seen, heard.
And on a good day, held.
The eternally sought feeling I now realize I'd been chasing the whole time.
Three words that have followed me around for a while now, eventually finding their way onto the cover of my eighth album.
Last week I wrote about what they have come to mean to me. Today, I've found myself examining them from the other direction.
Because if any of these adaptations were learned with hopes of ensuring safety, then I can't help seeing the question underneath.
Who am I in a world where none of it was ever necessary?
Seen Heard Held releases on 16 October 2026, on Warner Chappell Music.
You can presave the release here.
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