Once a month I get together with our private lesson students in a group setting called studio class so we can play a piece of music for each other and do some learning about music history and theory. We have been exploring the life and works of Beethoven for the past several months using a wonderful online resource called Beethoven: Independent Man. I have a degree in music but it’s been 15 years since my music history courses so I am learning a lot alongside the kids.
Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany but moved as a young man to Vienna where he lived for the rest of his life. Though living in the city he had an ardent love for nature and took frequent walks in Vienna’s parks as well as trips to quiet country towns. He reflects this love for nature in his Sixth Symphony—known as the Pastoral Symphony. I’ve responded to this piece’s gentle beauty lately and it has captured my imagination. Who knows if I would have associated its sounds with nature had it not been named the Pastoral Symphony but it is quite fitting for me as I myself have been experiencing the healing power of nature in this phase of my life.
My dad loves the outdoors and he filters that love through his passion for bow hunting. I went on hunting trips with him in my childhood and I remember my first opportunity to shoot a deer. I was alone in the tree stand and saw this beautiful gentle animal walking underneath me and I remember thinking “I don’t want to kill it.” I took the shot anyway because hunting was what I was there to do. I gut shot that poor creature and we never found it. I continued tagging along on my dad’s hunting trips simply for the fun of going but I never hunted after that day and never quite understood what drew my dad to spend all those hours sitting quietly in the woods.
Now I am a grown man (I’ll be 40 later this month) and thanks to my wife’s prescience have been introduced, after all these years, to a way to experience, appreciate, and learn about nature in a deeper way than I ever have before. More on that soon.
We see ourselves through the lens of our experience and new experiences can unlock new facets of our being. For me, self-knowledge of my innate identity as an artist—as someone whose most fundamental resonance is with beauty and who finds peace when I am creating something—didn’t come until I was married. It literally took my wife telling me “You know you’re an artist, right?” for this lightbulb to flash on for me in my late 20s. I didn’t understand myself as an artist for the simple and understandable reason that that identity had never been validated in my growing up years. I had simply never known an artist, so how could I reliably identify an artist’s way of being in the world as my own? Understand me here: I have lived as an artist all my life—from boyhood I was filling journals with poems, self-reflections and drawings and once I was introduced to the trombone and then guitar my time was spent with an instrument in hand until my mom would have to finally come upstairs and tell me, “Dean, I’m trying to sleep, you need to stop playing now.” But even though I was filtering life through the art I consumed and created, I didn’t know the name artist was for me.
In a similar way, I didn’t know nature was for me. Since my primary experience of someone who loved nature was my dad-as-hunter I didn’t have a frame for nature loving that I could resonate with. That frame has recently opened for me, though, through the models of John James Audubon, John Muir Laws and David Sibley—all men who filter a love for nature through the lens of art. Last year my wife gave me a birthday present of a pair of binoculars and Sibley Birds East and through that book the world of birding has opened up for me. This year she got me an amazing camera and now I am seeing a new world of details on birds high in trees through my 600mm Sigma camera lens. As I begin to live into artist-as-naturalist I am starting to understand my dad as hunter-as-naturalist better. He and I respond to the same healing qualities of nature—the stillness and quietude; the knowledge of ourselves as part of the natural world; the company of animals; the simplicity and clarity that come from being apart from the machinery of modern life.
One gift I hope to give all my students as I sit with them in studio class or private lessons is the gift of knowing someone who is an artist. I see artistic identity in many of my students: My banjo student Jay has painted a beautiful nature scene on his banjo case. Kate shared in guitar lessons that she got Procreate for her ipad this Christmas because she loves to draw. Kady loves exploring song writing in her lessons. These are children and teens who are already making sense of their life experiences through the lens of art and I want them to have a positive role model in their life of someone who identifies himself as an artist—someone who believes not only in their potential as creators of music but also validates their current and blossoming identities as artists. For me as well as these students, art is something you do but artist is something you are.
Living in 2021 I feel especially thankful for Beethoven’s example of musician-as-naturalist. It is fairly easy for me to spend an entire day in the house without ever setting foot outside. I have in many ways been cut off from nature by modern technology but in other ways, with intention and foresight, I can use technological advancements to enable a connection with nature. Here is one example: My family and I recently spent two months living in an RV in a beautiful campground in central Florida. For those two months I connected with my students and staff via Zoom under a canopy of southern live oaks that I shared with cardinals, ibises and a newborn owl. It was in many respects an amazing encounter with nature. My 8 year old son August was playing in the woods when a fish fell from the sky right in front of him (we are assuming some unfortunate osprey lost a grip on his lunch). His 5 year old brother Dakota picked up the fish and brought it into the camper, much to my wife’s surprise. I learned to distinguish between cabbage palmetto and saw palmetto trees and between the calls of a pileated woodpecker and a sandhill crane. I spent early mornings in the dark at the dock and gazed up at stars in the nighttime. My day as a business owner and father of 4 boys usually starts at 5:15am and ends about 8pm and all that nature helped to calm me, slow me down and make me feel more grounded, connected and safe no matter what my bank account balance was, how many students I had or how my quarterly goals were progressing.
We returned from our trip south to a Michigan in amazing spring time bloom. My eyes newly opened to the natural world are noticing all sorts of beautiful drama around me—buds popping on maple trees, magnolias beginning to flower (there are some absolutely stunning trees on Hall St.), and beautifully spotted non-mating European starlings showing up perched high above our roof deck. I’ll keep noticing and being thankful for the gift of nature freely shared with me, my dad, Beethoven and all of us.