02009-03-17 | Uncategorized
Woke up at 01:30. Was I startled by a noise or a dream? Turned my little 2W LED reading light on and started reading The Pyramid by Henning Mankell – and suddenly it was 05:00. I went back to sleep for a while and got up at 06:30. Well, I don’t have to drive any heavy machinery today, just a couple of phone interviews in the morning, so lack of sleep won’t be a problem. Phone interviews can be fun. One can be dressed or naked for a phoner, one can violently shake one’s head No! while one says sweetly oh yes.
Interesting comments to Saturday Music. Thank you.
Boris writes:
At school they taught us about music but they did not teach us music at all.
I understand what you mean. Music is ephemeral. It is difficult to teach such things. A melody may be inelegant or simplistic, a melody may be gratuitously complex, a melody may be a lot of things, but it is never wrong in the way that 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong. Therefore testing is difficult. If one emphasizes the rules that have been developed for music, one can test for understanding of those rules, but every one of the great composers broke many of them. So, how can one really teach music in a school system that overvalues testing? And, more importantly, is music less valuable because it is not as cut and dry? Basic math is easy to teach and easy to grade. Two apples plus four apples equals six apples. If the student writes five apples the answer is wrong. (((Well, things look quite different in higher math, but that is taught in universities.))) History is equally easy to teach, although, while it is easy to teach, test and grade historical facts it is much harder to convey historical meaning.
I am seeing some interesting connecting planes here… the basic computer is simple, it excels at Two apples plus four apples equals six apples. It’s the other stuff, the stuff music, art and meaning are made of that the computer has a much harder time with. (((give it a couple more decades!!))) Have we adapted teaching to how computers work? Somehow we have decided to throw out a lot of stuff that is very important for the human experience, the stuff that cannot be tested or verified, the stuff that is difficult to teach and equally difficult to get – but oh so important and rewarding.
Some of my favorite hours in school, the memorable hours, the ones that changed my thinking, my outlook, were the ones where a teacher talked about something passionately and they were always classes that could not possibly be graded, unless one simply graded for participation. Those are the moments that inspire. Should one get rid of those, because they cannot be tested and graded?
I am thinking ahead to April… maybe a LAVA track I remixed last week, (((much improved, methinks!))) plus a track from the recordings I made with Rahim, plus a song or two from next week’s rehearsals… whaddaya say? Thanks to all who have signed up to Ottmar-Friends in the last couple of days. The response has been great. We’ll have a lot of fun!
Time for me to stop staring at the screen and get out there. The weather is frightfully dry, but gorgeous!
02009-03-16 | Letters to a Young Musician
Dear Friend,
There is practicing and there is performing and they are two very different sides of a coin. Practice is a solitary act while performance involves an audience, large or small. Having an audience changes everything.
Practice is something you will get used to doing every day, like eating, drinking, sleeping. Few artists perform every single day.
The truth is, you can’t practice performing. You practice to practice and you can practice to get ready to perform, but performing is so very different…
You can practice landing, rolling and catching your fall, but you can’t practice parachuting – unless you jump out of a plane. You can train your body to run a long distance, but you can’t train running a marathon race in a large pack of runners – unless you run many marathons.
So that’s how you practice performing – by performing. It’s as simple as that. The more you perform, the better you become at performing. The more you perform the more at ease with performing will you become. True, some people are natural performers, but I find that they are rare exceptions. Most people grow into themselves on stage over time.
After we returned from our first tour in 1990, we did a benefit concert in Santa Fe. Everyone in the band had lots of friends in the audience and we were excited and nervous. As a result we raced through 90 minutes of material in about an hour. Now, many years later the band seems to settle into a certain tempo for a song and that tempo doesn’t change much from performance to performance.
And remember: practicing is practicing and performing is performing. Do both!
02009-03-16 | Uncategorized
You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do.
These are the final two paragraphs of a speech given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, to welcome this year’s freshman class. Oh, I do like when a guy thinks big. I think he’s right, too. Music does align our insides – I think we have all experienced that. I have been keeping one CD in my car for the last six months, Yo-Yo Ma and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. Most of the music on the CD is by J.S.Bach and does it ever align my insides in traffic!
What will it take to firmly establish music in every school? I think the subject Music is as important for a kid as English or Mathematics, but many parents do not agree.
02009-03-16 | Poetry, Quotes
This is interesting on so many different levels, but particular in terms of testosterone:
Protect me from what I want.
Poem of the day via Weekly Words of Wisdom:
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter;
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
– Wu-men
Or how about this from the Upaya Newsletter:
Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living in better conditions.
– Hafiz
