02013-04-24 | Musings, Reading
Without the listener there is no music. The listener completes the musical circuit, and, even though I am not a musician, I feel as if I am a form of musician when I listen and believe that, by hearing the piece, by responding to it with my thoughts of what it is and what it is doing – what it means – I am actually helping to finish it off. As the listener I am the final element in the making of the music. I have made the music useful. I have put it into context: the context of my own life, and my own perception of what music is, and why it exists.
– Paul Morley, Words and Music: a history of pop in the shape of a city
I do not think that music has to have a listener aside from the person or persons making the music, and I don’t believe that music has to be useful, but I like the above description of the listener completing a circle.
We could say the same about a reader who, by imagining the people and the landscapes described in a book, makes words come to life and thus completes the circle.
See also this, which I wrote about twenty years ago for Musician magazine.
02009-09-12 | Musings
A few songs a day keep the doctor away | Health Tech – CNET News
According to research out of the University of Belgrade at Serbia, listening to music every day might also be good for the heart. Predrag Mitrovic just presented his study of 740 patients to the European Society of Cardiology 2009 Congress, demonstrating that 12 minutes of music a day reduces blood pressure, heart rate, patient anxiety, as well as the likelihood of reinfarction and sudden death in acute coronary syndrome patients.
Let me get this straight. People should listen to music for their health. But, there is no money for music education in school. That is seriously wrong.
(Thanks for the link Carol)
02009-09-04 | Guitar, Music, Musings
We practice to create space. This is true for playing a musical instrument, but applies to everything else as well, I think. Practicing creates familiarity. Familiarity creates intimacy.
When we practice playing a piece of music or a scale, we train our brain by using our body. We scrub those neural pathways by moving our fingers. And that creates space. If moving from this note to that note has been trained and ingrained, we no longer have to think about that move and are free to consider other or additional moves. If moving from point A to point B has become utterly natural, then I have established space between those two points in which I can make additional moves. Or, imagine jumping from a rock to another rock. Once that jump has become easy, we might add a turn, a twist or a salto. In music, we might add a new note, a trill, a tremolo, a vibrato… We have created space (or time) in which to make additional moves – or choose not to! The more natural that jump or that piece of music becomes, the more space we have created. Then we have more time and more choice.
I find it important that the space we have thus created should not necessarily be filled with additional notes as we can use that space to embue the sound with more intent or emotion instead. When we no longer have to work at getting to the next note or musical sound, we can enjoy playing the current note with complete conviction.
02009-07-08 | Musings
Another post from two years ago:
Even though we humans are 99.5% identical, that 0.5% makes all the difference in the world and no two people are alike, even if they are siblings. I wrote that none of the software predicting what I might like works for me… This morning I built a bridge between those two statements. The predicting software is assuming that taste is linear, but it is not. Taste is a cloud, just like the genetic mix that makes each person so different. It is personal and cultural and rooted in time… What I mean is that my reason for liking a particular sound or melody is predicated by a very complex and completely different set of parameters than exists for the next person.
Therefore I might love A but not at all like B, while the next person loves both or neither… In fact the painters or authors I like, which poems by Naruda I love, whether I prefer coffee or tea (actually I love both) might be more of a key to which music I like than asking me about musical genres!
Taste is a cloud, not a list. Taste is incredibly complex. It’s like that interview question, the one a journalist might ask when they haven’t listened to your music and don’t have a clue what you are about: what influences you? Hm, how about everything, every ray of light, every particle refracting and reflecting those rays of light, every sound and every surface reflecting that sound, every person I have touched and who have touched me, every story I read, every word I heard, every scent… all that has created my taste, my inspiration, my particular take on things, which is as complex as my personal DNA and which is fluidly changing constantly!
02009-07-06 | Musings
I wrote this two years ago:
This most likely will be a long rambling post about stuff that’s been on my mind. I have talked about it on separate occasions with Jon Gagan (over lunch), Andrew Gaskins (over tea), Keith Vizcarra (in his workshop when I dropped off my fav DeVoe for crack-patching) and Colin and other Integral-types (after the Boulder show last Friday)… There is really nothing new here, just a few lines connecting stuff – trying to make sense of how it fits together.
Television moved from 4 channels to cable/sattelite with 400 channels and now to YouTube. Less editing and more choice. I am told that one of the most viewed clips on YouTube is some guy lighting his fart, which I think says a lot about the medium. Parallel to that we have the music biz. Up until the mid-nineties recording was so expensive that only a few musicians would stay in the game if they didn’t receive record company support. A large number of musicians would simply drop out after a while and decide to play in cover bands or take other jobs. Out of the musos that stayed in the game and continued to find ways to pay for studio time with the money from lots of live-performances, a willing donor or day-jobs, the record companies would pick a very small number who received corporate support. So, two elements whittled down the number of acts, the cost of recording and the record company selection process.
Here is what I do in the face of too much choice:
After surfing lots of channels and not finding anything to watch I usually decided that it was a waste of my time and grabbed a book. Then I got rid of TV altogether. The same is true for music. I buy a lot less than I used to. I am overwhelmed by the choice and frankly am not willing to put in the time to find something I might enjoy. I mostly rely on my network of friends to make suggestions.
Jon thinks that the next step in this chain from 4 networks to cable/sattelite to YouTube might be some kind of subscription to an editor or curator who emails his selections to customers. Somebody who wades through gigabites of crap to find the good stuff. I have mentioned the curator concept a number of times as well. See this post from 1999 or this one. I am not sure how many people would be willing to pay money for such a curator subscription, but there are other revenue models out that might work…
What might really work is a great network of people… I use the word people instead of friends because friends can be too homogenous. If you want to throw a great party you don’t invite a bunch of similar thinking people! No, you select a couple of extreme thinkers and you buffer them with moderates. Very important is how/where you seat everyone. There is a real art to this and some people have a great knack for it. Nothing will ever replace meeting people in meatspace… Warning: here starts another tangent… Speaking of meatspace, humans are 99.5% genetically alike. The remaining .5% is what we have killed so many people for: the shape of an eye, the curve of a nose, the look of a forehead – small and subtle differences when we consider all humans… A Korean girlfriend told me in the late Eighties about arriving in the USA when she was seven years old. She could not tell any of the white folks apart… they all looked the same to her. Well, that’s because it takes training to tell us humans apart by the 0.5% in genetic differential! So to each race the other, unfamiliar races look homogenous. The same is true for music, by the way. If you play Bebop or trad Flamenco to the uninitiated, they will not be able to hear what is outstanding about this particular version or how terrible this other one is… We can differentiate that which we are familiar or intimate with, everything remains apart. Another tangent: wouldn’t it be great if these tangents were another layer, hyper-linked to the main post and I could have several layers for each post… hm, has any blooging software ever considered coding something like this? Can’t be that hard and it would go another step in creating a new medium. Yes, I could work around this and create a separate post and then link to it – but that’s just not the same!! I am talking about having, say 3 or more layers available when writing a post. One could use a different link-color to differentiate between an outside link and a layer-link…
Anyway, what about the internet? Isn’t that a great space for networking? Not really. I think one really needs that person with a knack to bring the right people together. Zaadz does not do it for me, MySpace is plain ugly… So how would one go about it? One would have to have a beautiful and intuitive interface first of all. (What did you say on Friday, Colin? The most direct way between points A and B is the aesthetic solution? Something like that. Colin also mentioned that Ken Wilber and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas are contributing new thoughts on the subject of editing or quality.) And no, a computer cannot create that network – I have not once liked a suggestion amazon.com has offered me. You might answer that the system is just not complex enough and does not have enough data yet. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s just not something a computer can do well. If you like this you are NOT necessarily going to like that…
The Good, the True and the Beautiful. Not a new concept. Plato came up with that a long time ago and Ken Wilber has written a lot of great stuff about it. My question is this: Is a life worth living if you are only offered clean water and clean air, but no elegance or beauty? And what happens when Beauty is eliminated from our schools because politicians and parents don’t want to “waste” resources on art-education and music?
And one last thought: in the past it was easy, even convenient, to literally forget about the masses… the plebs, the “great unwashed“. They were fodder for wars and industry. The less education was offered to people, the easier it was to manipulate them. Well, now they will be the ones deciding whether this planet will live. We can no longer afford to solve a manufacturing problem (read: design problem) by shipping the poisonous waste to Africa or Asia and we can no longer afford to ignore education (and that includes art and music education) if we want to create a bright future. As Ken has pointed out many times, nobody can skip stages, but we can sure try to help the development along, maximize the speed and opportunity at which people can move upwards. Now everywhere is our backyard and everyone is our brother/sister.
02009-01-03 | Music, Musings
There is no complete translation, only intuitive understanding is possible. “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” How can the intuitive understanding of music be enriched and improved? By opening oneself to the sound one can glean its meaning. As water flows down the brook and fills the bucket, meaning flows from music and fills us with emotions. I feel that there is no bad music, only music made with bad intentions. There is no good music, only music made with good intentions. Clever music can be boring because it was created with the intention of impressing people. The simplest music can be captivating because it was created from joy. I would like my music to originate from the depth of my emotions, from the joy that playing guitar gives me, and not from a need to impress.
