What does the soundtrack to "New Story" sound like?

I'm still not a cultural pessimist, and I'm not hung up on the good old days, but the thought that we've lost all kinds of good things at a gallop in the course of progress is creeping up on me with increasing frequency. Making music together, for example. Who does that anymore? Away from the professional world of studios and stages. Home music, with each other. Just like that. Not because you can do it better, or because it sounds better than the music played on recordings and streams. But because it's fun. Not just like that, but for this, the very best reason.

Or: first make music with yourself alone, just because it's fun? When you learn to play a musical instrument, you learn - as if that weren't enough on its own - a whole lot more than how to play. However, many of us did not have particularly edifying experiences with it in our childhood. On the contrary! The thought of the weekly recorder lesson, of violin or piano lessons often triggers memories of compulsion, torment and embarrassment, one wants to throw oneself headlong off the top rung of the scale, from the very high C down. Having to practise!?! Not be able to do something?!? Not again!!! Showing off one's skills and being shown off - under the Christmas tree, at Grandma's birthday, at the final concert: people are happy! Above all, they're happy when it's finally over. You yourself are the happiest of all and hide behind the curtain.

Nowadays, many people want to spare their children this kind of musical trauma. And rightly so. Unfortunately. That's why many only know high C from juice bottles and Ariana Grande.

Summer of '79

I was sentenced to play the recorder (C and F) as an elementary school kid and hated it. In grammar school I wanted to play the guitar myself and - to quote Bryan Adams:


I got my first real six-string

Bought it at the five and dime

Played it till my fingers bled

It was the summer of '69

For me, it was more the Summer of '79, but that didn't dampen my unbridled zeal, although it did eat up a huge portion of my time budget for school learning. My day also only had 24 hours.

I taught myself to play the guitar. A little bit at least. Just enough to cross the threshold to "we're forming a band" and did so with hearty recklessness, as Bryan Adams would put on record a few years later:

Me and some guys from school

Had a band and we tried really hard

With Harry (drums), Ufo (bass), and Schoberl (guitar). And at 16.At that age, you tend to overestimate everything, and you're usually at the top of the list, but you don't see it.And when you're in a band, you usually don't hear much except yourself, and that's as loud as it gets. That's usually louder than is healthy, in every respect. Because the benefit of the experience of making music together lies equally in the music and in the togetherness, and that requires above all the high art of listening to each other, which has become homeless today.

My career as a rock star carried the highly fertile seed of failure right from the start. It soon sprouted vigorously. My magnificent guitar hung on the nail longer and longer, eventually collecting entire years of house dust on its beautiful shoulders.

Much later, when my daughter wanted to learn the keyboard in her primary school years, my heart leapt up and the guitar jumped back into my long-disoriented paws. Making music together with your child, without immediately getting lost in the footsteps of Dan Kelly or Georg von Trapp, that is something special. That was a special promise of quality time for me, and it happened. Not too often, but three times, I think. Listening still didn't really work out, structurally speaking. Because as my daughter, who has grown up in the meantime, recently told me, the desire to learn the keyboard - to put it mildly - did not come directly from her personally. If I remember this conversation correctly, despite my shaky short-term memory, Laura used the word "hated". In any case, we could now accompany ourselves with recorder and keyboard during the moritat of the transgenerational trauma experience.

A few months ago—I think it was whenPeter Jackson announcedthe upcoming"Get Back" documentary, which was like good news for us Beatles fans—I remembered my guitar and the many positive, joyful hours I spent with it, and that such things had long since disappeared from my life. Neatly structured days, geared toward maximum output, plus a fitness routine and nutrition program, service with an emphasis on service and performance. The selection of movies and series I watch and the books I read is largely determined by what contributes to my work. My day still only has 24 hours. So the years go by, full of jam-packed 24-hour days, and suddenly, um... yes...

Last November, I made a New Year's resolution: I'm going to play music again! When SHE flitted into my field of vision as if guided by magic, I started the new year with an early Christmas present to myself. She is so beautiful! So who can blame me for hardly being able to keep my hands off her? This source of constant joy even has a name: "Lucille" – just like B.B. Kingnamed his guitar after a memorableevent in the winter of '49: Lucille – the inspiration for mine. Despite all skepticism, I can now rightly claim that I have a little something in common with the late B.B. King. To make it more than that, I now want to really learn how to play properly, beyond the youthful recklessness of strumming chords as a vocal accompaniment from the Beatles songbook.

Today, advances in technology make a lot of things easy. Great courses can be found online in abundance, though not even the best online course can replace a face-to-face lesson with a dedicated teacher. It's the same here as in real life.

And for electric guitars, there are tiny little amplifiers that you can plug in, hook up your headphones and practise at any time of the day or night without disturbing anyone. However - I couldn't help it - a not-so-tiny amplifier is within reach for emergencies. It still has "Mini" in the model name, but sometimes all the neighbours, even the neighbours in the house next door, know that I am at home and that the Summer of '69 is far from over. Word of honour!

Practising the exercise.

Learning a musical instrument is an exercise that I can recommend from the bottom of my heart. The music that comes out of it, if it goes well, is only one of the reasons. On top of that:

1. Practicing an instrument is also an exercise in humility.
2. You live completely in the moment, free from any distractions. It's like meditation: full presence in the moment.
3. You get into a flow sooner than you think.
4. You want to get better, you get better, you experience progress.
5. Your goal is success, but you experience true joy in growing and becoming. And beauty (sometimes).

It is an exercise in the fascinating Japanese cultural technique ofikigai. You do it just for yourself, because you want to, for yourself. Without a goal or purpose, without any usable benefit or necessary output, without pressure to achieve results, without hoping for likes or anything else. It is a quiet, contemplative, revolutionary act against the current zeitgeist, which seeks market opportunities in everything and sees everything and everyone as a resource. It is an act of resistance against the evil spirit that judges people according to their usefulness, according to what they can do, what they can bring to you.

Well, quite frankly, I'm not doing it aimlessly. That I won't be like Eric Clapton in a year's time, despite my slow hands, seems pretty certain to me, and the Bonamassa bar is so high I can't even see it. But what I would like to achieve in a year is to play together with others without breaking friendships. That's what it's all about: making music together with others. Tunes of the same kind make something sound - as an alternative to the network. That's rock'n'roll, baby!

Wouldn't that be a wonderful exercise for families, teams, companies or organisations to say: "We are starting a band"? Just like that. Or not just like that, but because it's fun. It doesn't have to sound good. The wrong tone is also part of music that is made by people. And so are the nuances and listening to each other. The unshakeable certainty that everyone is heard and the clear understanding that no one wins in the interplay of all - no one may win, otherwise the exercise is a failure. A learning game in corporate culture and team building.

Hermann Hesse writes in "The Unity Behind Opposites": If I were a musician, I could easily write a two-part melody, a melody consisting of two lines, two series of tones and notes that correspond to each other, complement each other, fight each other, condition each other, but in any case, at every moment, at every point in the series, are in the most intimate, most lively interaction and mutual relationship.
And anyone who knows how to read music could read my double melody, would always see and hear the counterpoint, the brother, the enemy, the antipode to every note. Well, and it is precisely this, this two-part harmony and eternally advancing antithesis, this double line that I want to express with my material, with words, and I work myself sore at it, and it doesn't work. I keep trying again and again, and if anything gives my work tension and pressure, it is solely this intense striving for something impossible, this wild struggle for something unattainable. I want to find an expression for duality, I want to write chapters and sentences where melody and counter-melody are constantly visible at the same time, where every colorfulness is constantly accompanied by unity, every joke by seriousness. For me, this is the only way to live, fluctuating between two poles, moving back and forth between the two cornerstones of the world. I want to constantly point out with delight the blissful colorfulness of the world and just as constantly remind people that this colorfulness is based on unity; I want to constantly show that beautiful and ugly, light and dark, sin and holiness are only opposites for a moment, that they constantly merge into one another.

Hermann Hesse, by far the best writer among violinists, wroteaboutthese things and many otherobservations on music. Kurt Vonnegut also knew: "Practically every author I know would rather be a musician."

Music makes people human.

Music is something made by us humans. Yes, even if music can be produced by algorithms, even faster and better than most of us could, and perfectly formatted for target groups. But we humans must not let ourselves be reduced to what we can do. Music is more than frequencies, poetry is more than verse, love is more than hormone release. We humans are more than organisms, DNA and organ functions.

When we make music, we tell ourselves and each other a tangible story of connection beyond anything that can be explained. There's no need to explain anything, what's the point? Everything is self-evident anyway: Everyone is heard, but no one wins. The search for the damnable lowest common denominator, which is just another term for "lazy compromise", has come to an end. It dissolves in the greatest common multiple. In the complementary that we give each other as complementary mentors.

That would be the basic chord for the perfect team culture. And even more so for the team culture of the crew on Spaceship Earth. "Constantly I would like to point with delight to the blessed colourfulness of the world and just as constantly remind you that this colourfulness is based on a unity ..." Hermann Hesse is telling us that everything is based on a great, a real, a better than the old story.

If we tune in to the chime of multiple connectedness, a triad of learning/listening/sounding could be built for the soundtrack to a new story that is not about "good versus evil" and "us versus them" like the old story, and not about us being the good guys and defeating the others because someone has to win. No, wait: not someone, but the good guys, and that's us! Yes, this is the story of the good old days, which unfortunately are only old, but not good, but in fact wrong.

The new story tells of the harmony in connection of opposites in a better future, where we support each other instead of fighting. To a future where we want to live and want our children and grandchildren to live and make music together. A future of enabling instead of today's present of hindering. A future of listening, of tuning in to each other, of cooperation, of mutual support, of understanding, of heart building. In this future, we no longer have to try in vain to fill the vacuum of meaning in ourselves, in our companies and in our society through consumption and through material growth, i.e. through the exploitation of resources. There, meaning arises in harmony with oneself. You can still buy a cool guitar, by all means!

All of this is guaranteed not to happen quickly. For that, we absolutely have to think in terms of generations, and we need like-minded people in all places. In education, in business, in politics. Especially in so-called civil society, we need leaders who ask the right questions. For example: What would happen if, from now on, collaboration rather than dominance determined our life together? Or: Would we rather play streams and drown each other out, or play ourselves - with each other ... live?

So: let's get out of the comfortable karaoke zone! Are you in? One definitely is, namely my grandmother, old Story Dudette, who famously showed Jimi Hendrix how to hold a guitar long before the Summer of '69 and roared the power riff of her blues rock classic into his ears as a lullaby: "New Story. New Glory."