Music in the Park playing the vibes

    The need to make music is a human one. By the Fountain Hills Park lake is an outside music area. In a tight circle are eight different music makers, You can hammer tubes, strike bells, bang on cans, waggle ropes that move noisemakers, make sounds to call the cows home. All the instruments are unattended this morning, so, having the area, all to myself, I pick up a mallet and take a turn at one of them. This must have been how these instruments were discovered. Some cave man hit a mastodon skull with a rib bone, and, to his delight, the first melody in the world was composed. Hitting a small piece of metal with a mallet to get noise is easy. What is hard is to make a combination of noises, in the right order, with the right rhythm, that sound like music. Musicians have been wrestling with this conundrum since the dawn of time. I make myself a little melody and have fun. That is, I’ve heard many learned musicians say, ” the point of music.”