The final concert of the year if over and I’m sitting on my favorite chaise again, in almost complete silence for the first time today.  I don’t know if non-musicians ever think about this, but sometimes as a musician, I crave silence.  It’s why a lot of times, I don’t play music in my car to and from school because it gives my brain a rest.  From the minute I hit the school door, sometimes until I hit the sack at night, I am inundated with all kinds of sound, musical and otherwise.  And even in the silence, the music never really stops because I’m constantly audiating.

Audiating is a fancy word for hearing music in your head.  You know, like that song you get stuck in your head and it won’t go away?  Only with me, I may have multiple things going on.  For a while I’m hearing my choir sing something, then it goes to a tune my 2nd graders are doing, which may jump right into some pop tune with the same chord progression which turns into some commercial tune.  Every waking moment, music is constantly going on in my brain.  It tend to focus on what I’m working on at the time, but sometimes a tune pops in my head because of something someone says which reminds me of lyrics to a song.  Sometimes it just the same four bar phrase, over and over and over….

I used to really annoy my own kids when they were young because sometimes the stuff I heard in my head would leak out and I would be humming without realizing I was humming.  Until one of the kids would say with some disdain, “mom, you’re humming again”.  Somehow it always seemed to happen when I was shopping at the grocery store.  I was always singing when they were younger too and invariably, one of them would say, “mom, do you have to sing?  That’s embarrassing!”, to which I would reply, “this is what I do for a living so you might as well get used to it”.

Of course, hearing stuff in my head can be very useful.  If someone can’t remember the words to a song, all I have to do it audiate it and I can get the words for them. I tend to remember exact pitches so I don’t always need a piano or a recording to find the correct pitch for my kids to begin a song.  In fact, I work with them to audiate the song so that they too can hear the pitch without me.  You would be surprised how well they do with this.  Sometimes I just don’t trust my kids enough.

Well, like I said, the final concert of the year is finished and I am ready to crash.  Now, if I could just get that choir song with the percussion accompaniment out of my head….