Recall for a moment a time when you entered an unfamiliar cultural setting. What emotions did you feel? Were you hyper-aware of your body and your words? What did you hope would happen, and how did that differ from what actually happened?
One of the most important steps in learning cultural humility is not just to enter new cultural settings, but to reflect on those experiences afterward.
Recently I was remembering one of my first experiences in an unfamiliar culture. During college a friend invited me attend a Spanish-speaking church. On my first visit, I mentioned that I played piano. The church had been praying for more musicians, and they immediately invited me to come back as often as I could to accompany their music team.
Accompany. It occurs to me now how fortuitous it was that my first role in that intercultural setting was accompaniment. I’d like to share with you three lessons about intercultural humility that I learned from becoming an accompanist. I invite you to consider how to make these a part of your own intercultural experiences.
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Accompanists need practice. My overwhelming feeling upon joining this Hispanic musical group was inadequacy. I understood about 40% of the language. I didn’t know the songs. They expected me to play by ear with whatever key, tempo, and song the vocalists began, a totally new skill for me. Yikes. At first every note I played was wrong. But with practice, I learned. People extended me grace, invited me back, taught me to laugh at myself, and eventually sometimes we even sounded pretty good.
Accompanists don’t sit center stage. They support the beauty of other people’s voices. In college as a piano major, I took a class on piano accompaniment. The professor often waxed poetic about the high calling of accompaniment. She emphasized that accompanists have to put as much or more effort into playing to the best of their ability, and yet their whole purpose is to direct the focus toward someone else’s performance. If you accompany well, you bring out the best in someone else. When you are the minority in an unfamiliar cultural setting, the tendency is to feel hyper self-aware, as if everything you do is of utmost importance. If you’re white, your socialization probably makes this a very unfamiliar feeling, and you likely either deal with it by fleeing or by taking up more space—trying to look your best in all that attention. An advanced skill in both musical and intercultural accompaniment is to reflect light in ways that let others shine.
As an accompanist, you harmonize. Uplifting others’ voices doesn’t mean making no sound at all. A good accompanist is comfortable with who they are and aware of how their music harmonizes with others. Multiple musical lines weaving together in harmony create a beauty a single voice can’t produce. Often accompanists have a few moments in a song when they carry the melody, and a good accompanist knows how to bring out their own melody when the time comes, then recede while other performers lead. As you enter into unfamiliar cultural settings, you can never erase your own cultural background. Instead learn to blend your own strengths with others’, listening carefully and following others’ leadership.
As always, if you found this helpful please forward to a friend, and feel free to write with any questions or suggestions on your mind!
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P.S. Some friends wisely informed me after my last newsletter that the sign for “Mother’s Room” in Walmart was intended to point to a lactation room. I’m relieved to know Walmart wasn’t trying to equate mothers with baby toys, and impressed with this cool choice to create spaces for nursing mothers! Next time I’ll do a little more googling before leaping to conclusions, and let’s hope Walmart puts a little more thought into how they place their signage. At least one point still stands – let’s honor mothers and appreciate them as crucial and complex contributors to society!