Music and Language

by Michele Alonzo

There are a lot of similarities between learning how to play an instrument and how to speak a foreign language.

I learned how to play guitar by myself when I was a teen ager. At that time I had a lot of passion and willingness to improve, so every day I played more and more my favorite songs and music, sometimes by myself, sometimes with friends.

I developed more skills when one of my best friends, Umberto, decided to buy a guitar for himself and started to play too. We lived in the same building and I was basically his first guitar teacher. We started to play more and more together and in 1983 we enjoyed a wonderful trip together to Munich, Germany, where we basically paid most of our expenses by collecting tips when playing on Marienplatz. In the time frame of a few years, Umberto became a professional classical guitar master, while I dedicated my time to study for very demanding exams in college. So he became my teacher and I learned a lot from him.

 

My friend Umberto

 When I came to the United States, I left my guitar in Italy and, though I promised myself that one day I would play again, I never touched a string for two decades. So when my wife gave me an acoustic guitar as Christmas present last year, I thought it could well be a decorative object of the house, because it would take years for me to play a decent melody again.

I started to try a few simple tunes that I used to play in my 20’s, every day, every night. Amazingly enough, and against any expectation of mine, with a daily practice and some patience, after a few weeks and some sore fingers, I started to reproduce the same melodies I used to play over 20 years ago. After mastering the basic chords I had learned many years ago and working on proper positions, not only could I play the same music, but I could also play some music having more complicated tablatures, that I’d never tried in my life. I was amazed at what I could do and enjoyed my instrument more and more.

This proves that the brain is like a deep drawer where we store a lot of different things in our life, data that we are not even aware we possess anymore. The trick is to find the way to re-extract that knowledge and to keep it on the surface where you have easy access.

So, if practicing a language is like playing an instrument (or any other skill), I have to come to the following conclusions:

1. Learning a language when you are young is definitely an advantage because the brain memorizes the information and stores it in the long term memory. If you exercise on the instrument when you are a young adult, that knowledge will stick with you and you will play the same after many years when you use that same instrument.

2. If you learned the proper way, it is never too late to re-extract that data and use it right, even after two or three decades. It is there, even if you think it is gone. You just need to dig it out.

3. You must be patient when studying because at the beginning you are convinced that you will never be able to remember how to play that sequence of crazy positions on the fret board or how to properly use most of the 15 tenses to conjugate a regular verb.

4. You need to be consistent, because it takes time to reach a level where you don’t feel that people have to plug their ears when you play or speak.

5. Whatever level you are, you can get better. You can play a song better and better if you try each and every day, as you can pronounce and articulate a sentence better and faster if you use it consistently every day.

6. No matter how dedicated you are, there will always be a friend or neighbor who will play or speak better than you, because he or she has a better ear or because he or she has more time to study and practice. So don’t be frustrated, but listen to him or her and learn as much as you can, possibly playing or speaking with that person.

In conclusion, when students ask me what is the best way to learn Italian or to improve the knowledge of the language, I say: start studying now, be patient, be consistent, be confident, take your time, and don’t be disappointed if you don’t become fluent. It is important that even 20 years from now, you will be able to find your way again and to enjoy something you always liked.



First Words and Secret Codes

Genova, photo by Maryl Smith

My son was born in 1984 and the first word he learned from life in Cincinnati, Ohio was "owl."  Not the bird kind. The ATM.  In the mid-eighties, Central Trust (now PNC) created a marketing campaign to encourage customers to use a brand new technology with 24-hour access to their cash. They named their automatic teller machines the OWL and plastered locations all over town with their easily recognizable logo.  I didn't realize how often we were stopping by the money machine until one day my two year-old picked up on the obvious after I told him he couldn't have a toy truck in the window because we didn't have the money.  "OWL, Mommy, OWL," he said with a big smile, sure he'd solved all our problems.

Wow.  Usually parents are proud when kids learn something new all by themselves, but a quarter of a century after the fact, I'm still embarrassed about what came out of my babe's mouth and what it told me about who we were back then. 

I remember the first word I learned all by myself in Italian.

"Passione."

A few months after I started to date Michele, I enrolled at School Amici because his family didn't speak any English.  I was falling in love.  We talked about going home together.  Word got around quickly that I was the director's girlfriend and during the break other students would approach me about their "passione" for Italy.  "L'aria," they'd say with a dreamy look in their eyes .  "There's just something different about it."

I heard the word so often, "passione" naturally worked its way into homework assignments and dinner conversations, usually as a joke.  But I never interchanged the English word even if I was speaking English, because I could see in the speakers' eyes that the Italian version was a different beast, one that had nothing to do with sex and could not be directly translated no matter how much the two words sounded alike.

A couple years after we were married, I decided to spend two months in Siena working on my language skills at Dante Alighieri.  Different school.  Different country.  But there they were again, foreigners who looked a lot like me, usually middle-aged, almost always female, talking about their "passione."  Women from Germany.  Women from South Africa.  Women from Japan.  They'd flown half-way across the world to connect with a piece of their soul.

But my personal knowledge of the word remained purely intellectual. While I could use "passione" correctly in a sentence, it was something I'd never experienced about a place.  Italy was a pretty country, of course.  The food was tasty.  Lots of nice churches and old stuff.  "But I like lots of countries," I'd explain whenever this new group brought it up.  I was a cynic, secretly sure that these women were really just lonely and sad and depressed, desperately searching for a reason to feel.   "Passione must be the code word for a fling," is what I really thought, one last romance far from the tedious responsibilities of wherever they called home.

This year, ten years after I started to study the Italian language, I spent three weeks driving around the Riviera with my twenty-nine year-old daughter.  We had a blast.  One of the highlights happened on my last day when I overhead the desk clerk at the hotel explain to another member of the staff that the woman in Room 112 (me!) was American, but "lei parla italiano."

This time something had changed.  This time, I didn't want to get on the plane.  The morning after, when I put on a pot of coffee in my own kitchen, the same brand of coffee I always buy in Cincinnati, it tasted like sand.  I missed that faint, subtle scent in the early evening air that reminds you of nutmeg.   I went grocery shopping without make-up and when nobody sent the produce manager to the back in search of a more perfectly ripe melon, I was disappointed.  It was wrong, wrong, all wrong.

Three months later, it still is.  Italy apparently, with its great and infinite patience, has slowly whittled away at my defenses until I finally found my "passione."  It took me ten years, but I broke the code and now that's where I want to be, in a country where the first word you learn is about what you long for in your heart as opposed to efficient access to your cash..