=====================
      THE SESSION
 =====================

This evening I have been playing my irish whistle.

I point my browser to a website called The Session, which 
is a sort of crowd-sourced collection of irish flute tunes 
in many settings.

I can browse through barndances and jigs and reels for hours 
as I play each one through a few times and then move on to 
find another.

Later this week, I will be traveling to visit with a 
buddhist monk friend of mine. He asked me to bring an irish
whistle so we can play together. It makes me happy partly 
because I started him on the whistle, and now we can 
play together when I visit.

I like to encourage people to play an instrument. If you 
want to play, you can do it. 

I am part of the Historically Informed Performance 
movement. I will write about that some other time, but 
for now, it is enough to say that I play obsolete flutes
that are tuned differently than modern flutes. I like 
to use that to demonstrate to people that they can hear 
the difference between an Ab and a G#. In modern music,
those are the same tone - a half-interval between A and 
G - while in historic Baroque music, they are not quite 
the same. When I demonstrate the Ab and the G# and people 
can hear the difference, I point out that they have enough 
of an "ear for music" to differentiate pitches that are 
mere Hz apart.

So if you don't think you have an ear for music, you 
probably actually do. If you don't think you can play an 
instrument, you probably can. 

Give it a shot! It is fun!