Intruder

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I had a music lesson today and in it I learnt about the role intruders play.

Today my teacher was busy teaching me about chords. She teaches children, so her explanations are geared towards the young & restless. This musical expert is witty and bright. She is a wonderful teacher.  She compares notes to people. Three notes belong together to make a chord. They are family. But in a bar you can also have friends, notes that do not belong to the chord but that still work well together. You also have those exotic friends that come to visit you once in a blue moon from a strange and wonderful land, and they too are welcome. They make the song interesting. But then you have intruders. Their note is false. It hurts. You will hear it immediately if you play them and are not tone deaf. These intruders do not belong in any song. They are mistakes.

My teacher said, if you are unsure about the note you are playing, or how long it must be played, it is forgivable. But if you play the notes too quickly because they are easy to play, this is unforgivable, she said. It is important to count the right time and not to push the note of the next bar into the current bar.

I could not help but see the parallelism to relationships. There is a time for everything. And if two people only last as long as a bar in a staff, then at least each note should be played out.

In trying to write a love song, you sometimes misplace your fingers and touch on a note that was not meant to be part of the song. It is an intruder. But the chances to hit a note that belongs to your family or is a friend, either a close and familar friend or an exotic one, and an intruder are equal in chance. We need to keep practising to figure out who is part of the family and who is a friend, and to create a song that excludes intruders and welcomes exotic friends.

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