PRACTICE MAKES BETTER

By Kim Roney, Asheville City Council

I didn’t sit down and automatically know how to play Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat just because I loved it the first time I heard it. I had to put in a lot of practice. I listened to recordings and read different scores for interpretation. I experimented with moves to get the desired sounds to come out of the instrument. I sought feedback from my peers and from those with experience. I wrestled with taking action on the feedback I requested and was so generously offered. I knew what I had to do—more practice.

Listening, inviting feedback, and taking action is also what it takes for the love and empathy required to “walk a mile” in my neighbor’s shoes. In the midst of this storm of the overlapping crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, economic instability, and climate change, I still hear a call for a cause for celebration. Our Asheville community has deep and festering wounds, and if we’re going to recover from these serious times without creating even more harm, we’re going to have to choose truth, healing, and reconciliation. I yearn for us to get in right relationship with one another as a human family and to heal our home planet. I can’t do this work alone. None of us can.

Music and art can be key to getting us where we want to be—our reason to dream and to convene, to be curious or patient, even when it’s unfamiliar or uncomfortable. The sound waves entering our ears and vibrating within our bodies, the light streaming into our eyes and warming our faces, and the space to simply be together. If we invite and make room for each other, if we maintain our cultural hubs through the pandemic, if we act meaningfully on feedback, and if we share our resources, we will realize the abundance of our community.

Without action, we’ll allow for extraction, exclusion, greed, and the perpetuation of inequity. As the audience, we are the biggest resource. Complacency is more comfortable than change, and rehearsed mistakes are easier to ignore than to acknowledge and unlearn.

I ran through my Chopin nocturne today, and it isn’t quite where I think it should or could be. If my work is going to be worth sharing, if there’s going to be a cause for celebration, I’ll have to put in some time. I’ll have to practice.

Kim Roney, Asheville City Council