The Harmonica Acronym
Life Advice from The World's Smallest, Most Thoughtful Instrument
A few months ago, I went to the woods of Scotland to work on my book. The cold, wet, whipping winds of the Highlands tore at my little hut night and day as I huddled in my bed next to the wood-burning stove. In the mornings, the blinding light dazzled the sleep out of my tiered eyes as I rose to sit at the little desk, a big stack of books next to me, open my notebook and write.
Every morning, I sipped my bitter powdered coffee and looked out on the vast bushy grasslands. Every moment I was out was an opportunity for self-reflection, creativity, and stillness. It forced me to confront the magnitude of writing a book and why I had chosen to write.
Below is an excerpt from that journal:
In many ways, harmonica is a lifestyle. It’s not simply putting your time in during the day; it’s committing to all the idiosyncracies of our beloved instrument. It’s taking the jokes about being a harmonica player. It’s realizing the limitations and playing to the strengths. It’s understanding that there will always be another player better than you, and it's exciting to see that reality.
Harmonica means different things to different people. To me, I’ve summarized how I feel about the harmonica into this acronym:
Happiness
Awareness
Raw
Memory
Opportunity
Natural
Illumination
Change
Adventure
Happiness.
Harmonica is happiness. It sounds like a bumper sticker that some campfire-obsessed hippies would have on the back of a Volkswagen. But, in some less cheesy fundamental way, this sentiment has some truth. After fifteen years of playing this thing, the harmonica indeed reaps much happiness.
Why do we pick it up?
Because it makes you happy.
Have you ever heard Stevie Wonder’s harmonica? I don’t think you can get closer to hearing a smile than that.
It’s not so much the happiness you feel as a player as the joy you spread to your listeners. The harmonica kindles inside the listener a certain tangible nostalgia for a time they can't get back and awakens a meditative moment they never knew they needed. The audience emotionally invests in the harmonica even if they don’t know it.
Awareness
A deep awareness runs through the minds of the greatest harmonica players. Listen to Little Walter; his attention to detail, timing, and tone are so genius that it's no wonder we regard him as the greatest of all time.
The harmonica offers the player a platform of awareness. As musicians, we must always be aware of how we and our instruments relate to the chords, the dynamics, and, most importantly, the people we are playing with.
Harmonica, in particular (because most players close their eyes when they play), has a trance-like quality. You become incredibly absorbed and obsessed in the moment of playing, and it's easy to get carried away. It requires, in a sense, more discipline than other instruments because it's so easy to lose control.
To be a great harmonica player, you must have great awareness.
Raw
There’s no denying the rough and ready nature of our beloved instrument. Since its creation, It’s been an instrument in flux, in the hands of those who needed a way to make music despite the vicissitudes of their situations. It provides (besides talking and singing) the most precise representation of the human breath. We all have our own character, way of communicating to the world, and story. The harmonica allows the player to reveal something about themselves when they play in an unobstructed form.
Memory
What do people think of when they hear a harmonica? Is it some lonesome echo of a distant past? Is it a crowded, smoke-filled juke joint with a toothless bartender slinging giant beers and double shots of unwatered whiskey? Indeed, harmonica has the unique ability to transport the human mind to many hidden places in our subconscious. Its timbre and texture reveal more about us than it does about itself.
Harmonica is memory. It is the memory of time gone by, of people we once knew, and of musical roots we will never return to except in the nostalgia of our minds.
Opportunity
When I look at a harmonica, I see a need to create. As harmonica players, we would not be able to truly exist in the world without this crucial vehicle of expression. A part of me would always be missing. When I see a harmonica, it is a chance to add a piece of me to the world’s music that had laid dormant in me my whole life.
Much like a painter needs paint and a writer needs a pen, I need my harmonica to express myself.
No two times are the same. The harmonica remains the same, but I have changed every time I pick it up. New insights, new emotions, and fewer feelings of anxiety about playing. It’s an opportunity to hear what my breath sounds like.
Being such a carefree instrument allows the harmonica to have no hubristic sense- no sense of entitlement or class, so it becomes the perfect instrument that remains open to experience, travel, and discovery.
Opportunity + Awareness= Growth
Natural
Nothing is more natural than breathing. In this case, nothing is more natural than putting air in and out of a harmonica.
Experienced players will tell you that the best thing you can do on harmonica is breathe naturally. It is a testament to one of the greatest secrets of the instrument: from relaxation comes fluidity, and from fluidity comes improvement.
Be like Water, my friend, as Bruce Lee famously said.
Harmonica is not easy, but the longer I play, the more I realize how crucial this advice is.
Illuminating
When I first came to harmonica, I didn’t know anything. I didn't know who Little Walter was, what a “bent note” was, or what that technique called “tongue blocking” was. What you find when you stick with harmonica for a long time is just how palpable the layperson's ignorance is when they think of harmonica. As most people do, I bought my first harmonica, thinking I would have it mastered within a few weeks… Now, 15 years later, I can happily say that I still haven’t mastered it. And that makes me excited.
Harmonica is illuminating because it gives us and our egos a mold to fit. Sure, it looks easy on the surface but, as with many journeys and people we meet throughout our lives, this is merely a facade to mask the reality of harmonica:
As Joe Filisko says, “It’s the easiest instrument to play badly and the hardest to play well.”
We can’t learn everything at once, and we can’t hope to know everything in our lifetime. Harmonica is a lifelong journey of self-discovery perpetuated by a steadfast commitment to the daily practice of “I love it today, tomorrow, and the day after that.” In this age of instant gratification and high-speed streaming, maybe what we need is not more revolution but more revision about what we deem to be essential to our daily existence.
As Virginia Woolf says in To the Lighthouse
“The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were daily miracles, illuminations matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
Change
In many ways, the harmonica is an instrument of change. Of adaptation, of movement, of shifting identities. I look at a harmonica, and I see an instrument that’s been through some shit but, despite that, constantly pushes forward.
Not only has the instrument changed over time, but it has a lasting effect on whatever lucky or unfortunate soul picks it up. We gravitate toward it, perhaps, because, at some fundamental level, it is the most human instrument—not set in stone, biased, or hierarchy but constantly evolving.
You must change with the instrument so that it may change you.
Adventure
The journey of harmonica is a long one. More so than any other instrument, the harmonica is a lifelong companion because it can go with you anywhere. It is a conduit through which you relate to the world, and the world relates to you. When I picked up my first harmonica, I had no idea it would so profoundly change my life; how could I? But that’s how every great adventure begins; we never know what we have signed up for until we hop right in and start.
Throughout the trials and tribulations of this life, there are not many constants. We live in a world obsessed with what’s next instead of what’s right in front of us. We seek to know everything simultaneously and squander our chance for delayed gratification. Whatever you may experience in our topsy-turvy world, the harmonica will be there for you.
Your therapist.
Your companion.
Your friend for life.
And all it requires of you is time, consistency, and your breath.