On Music and Becoming My Father's Father
Hello, and welcome to Sun People Blog. I'm Benny Oyama! I am a double-hyphenated Jewish-Japanese-American musician based in New York. This is the Sun People blog, where my good friend and collaborator Amos Rose and I will be sharing our thoughts about music, recordings of songs, videos, and other things we find special, important and worth reading about.
On Music and Becoming My Father's Father
I am always refining my approach towards creating something truer, more resonant, more awesome. I am learning that composing music requires a certain surrendering to a process that is not fully conscious and cannot be accessed in a world that language creates.
For a long time, writing music in solitude had been infinitely easier than working with other people as it removes the messy (albeit highly rewarding) inter-subjective space that arises when people get together. I like to feel free to scream, guffaw, cry, and run around the house without any of the self-consciousness I might feel when I'm not alone. This is just my own thing; i'm not sure what other people do. Often my solitary writing sessions happen with the companionship of a cup of coffee or a capped mug of tea, and perhaps the orange glow of a setting sun is present and reminding me that change is a constant, and requires a constant surrendering much like the process of creation that put me in that orange room in the first place! I'm also slowly and surely learning the art of composing new music with my collaborators; but that's for another blog post.
So, even something so penetrating as music has all of this language built up around it. Some people also think of music as something transcendental; that it moves us to a place beyond language, beyond history, towards revealing a deeper reality. I think when we create music we are trying to vibrate at that fundamental level; narrative or storytelling offers the artist an opportunity to explore that vibration by rooting it in experience, delivering that experience through language, in the hopes of accessing something deeper. Simple!
I've written a song for my father, a song that was born out of the orange glow of sessions much like the ones I described earlier. It's here: "Bobby O".
I have felt sad because I recently have had to take control of my father’s finances because his ability to take care of things, following a series of strokes, is slipping away. It has been and continues to be a hard lesson in growing up and accepting a responsibility I'm not fully prepared to handle. As I issue him monthly allowances while offering a necessary reminder to him that is all he will get for the month, I am slowly becoming my father’s father, offering him the boundaries he needs right now out of love. There is no shame or guilt here - just a dutiful sense of what needs to be done.
I carry out my task with the love and gratitude of the gifts he has given me, namely his musical talent and flair for entertaining. Even as he fades, he still manages to summon forth the slickness and charm of the 50's by harmonizing acapella doo-wop with his friends during our holiday get-togethers in Riverdale and at our family friend's apartment on 123rd st. In April of 1943, my grandparents left the Japanese internment camps in Jerome and wound up a year later in Morning Side Heights where this photo was taken:
I stumbled upon this amazing photo online in a Japanese American database; I love how elegant my grandfather looks as he presents the vinyl record, as if extending his hand into the future and offering the gift of music to me through his first son, who was born just three days before this photograph was taken! My feelings these days are captured well by this photograph, and in this poem.
My father points me to the past,
He is who I became. I point my
Father to the future, I am who
He hoped to be. My mother points me
To the past, she is my longing. I point
My mother to the future, I am her joy
That speaks to love without end. We
Three together have broken the shell
Of ignorance, we have traveled far
For travelers who knew not their way.
But the wind of faith wrapped itself
Around us, its direction the dying yellow
Of leaf squeezing out its last breath. We
Gave into death as day gives into
Night, as the dreams carried us through,
As dawn billowed out of sleep. I
Found myself alone that morning,
I found myself crying out alone. But
The wind no longer blew and the leaf
No longer clung. And I am no longer pointing.
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