Twisty, Curvy Roads

MUSIC??? Do ink blots on a piece of paper constitute music? No, printed musical notation is simply a plan, or blue print, that allows musicians  to communicate musical ideas to each other. What each individual musician does with those general musical ideas can be significantly different. Music is a dramatic structure. It is up to the performer to tell a musical story. The performer must engage the listener in the drama just as the author of a novel must engage his readers. The musicians job is to look for musical events and effects that will do just that. 

During my years as a high school band director, I often had a nagging feeling that the tail was wagging the dog. We worked many, many hours preparing for this contest and that contest. We were so busy preparing for contests that there was very little time left to actually teach music. The kids in my band had great technique, they were practically professional - in fact, we spent a lot more time practicing and rehearsing than many professionals do. We won contests, but still there was this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I was not teaching "Music".   I know that some of the kids picked it up because a large number of them went on to become professional musicians and music teachers. But to be truthful, I think that those were the kids that would  have done well at just about anything. Being in the band may have given them some inspiration, but I still do not feel that it was because I was teaching them to understand music. There were other kids who wanted to so badl...

Jazz In New Orleans My impulse is to answer the title question with, "hopefully after the gig is finished!", but why offend the one or two banjo owners who are actually musical? So I will think it but not say it. The musicians job is to create a drama for the audience. The musician tells a story that draws the audience into an experience that is beyond ordinary, day to day life. Obviously the musician must know his instrument. Scales, chords, loud, soft, timbre, articulation..., all of those are necessary. But musicianship goes beyond simple mastery of an instrument. One does not approach "musicianship" until they begin to approach music as a dramatic structure. A horn player just plays notes - a "musician" tells a story. The first step to understanding the dramatic structure of a piece is to decide what is important to the drama and what is not. In gestalt terms, the musician must know what is figure and what is ground. Of course there are sta...

Gestalt psychologists have studied figure and ground extensively as applied to visual presentation, but there has not been a lot of discussion of figure and ground applied to musical performance. In reality, figure and ground is one of the most fundamental musical decisions that a perform must make. It is a decision that must be made in every performance. The classic hag/girl picture to the right is a well know example. You either see an old hag, or you see an attractive young lady. This visual example points out very well the ability that we have for seeing the same thing differently.  Music is filled with ambiguity. Practically every phrase can be interpreted differently. Jazz in particular offers the musician many different expressive possibilities. The most basic of these is whether a particular part should be interpreted as part of the figure or as part of the ground. As a jazz performer, you must constantly decide if what you are doing is figure or ground. If you fa...

Beethoven, so we are told, composed symphonies even though he was stone deaf. "Music" existed in Beethoven's ears. So, strictly speaking, it is possible to have music without having sound.  I too hear "sounds" that do not exist. The difference is that what rings in my ears is caused by tinnitus  not a fertile Beethoven-esque musical imagination. Still, I sometimes manage to entertain myself by paying close attention to sounds within my ear. So far I have identified at least seven different sounds that exist only in my ears. Those sounds range from what seems to be sparrows and crickets chirping to a low mechanical drone that I often mistake for an air-conditioning fan. The sounds exist simultaneously and continuously, and the right and left ear have different sounds.  At times the sound is very loud. When my attention is focused elsewhere, the sounds drop from my consciousness. Just as the sounds of my tinnitus fade from consciousness when my attention...

In the last post I posited that order and predictability are basic human values. The ability to see order and predict what will happen based upon that perception is the basic skill that has allowed humans to survive and, in fact, dominate this world. There are other creatures with physical attributes that far out weigh our human physical attributes. Why is it that we puny humans have survived and dominated? Clearly, the human brain has given the human species an inordinate advantage over competing species. And what the human brain does best is to organize perception into patterns. That is the ability that has allowed us to, not only survive, but to thrive as a species. The human brain excels in perceiving patterns and predicting future events based upon those patterns. The survival value of this skill is so great that, over the span of time. it has become an innate human value in and of itself. We like patterns because they give us a head start on survival..., they make u...

Isn't it strange how miscellaneous bits and pieces contribute to our overall sense of who we are? I first saw the doodle above on the blackboard in some unremembered philosophy class. The unremembered professor of the unremembered course drew the doodle as a toss-off joke. The only thing that I remember about the class is this doodle! The professors point was that rationality (logos) is a very small component of the Universe (cosmos). If fact, it is possible to make a very good argument that "rationality" is not an inherent attribute of anything. That it is we, ourselves, who impose rationality upon what is essentially an order-less chaos! That "rationality" is a tool that we have developed to help us protect ourselves from the dangers of an unpredictable existence, and that we attempt to impose rationality upon every aspect of reality because it gives us the illusion that we are in-control, that we can predict and influence the future, and are therefore "s...

It has been a long while since I posted to this blog. But with the new year just beginning, perhaps this is the time to get back to a bit of writing. I am pretty certain that few, if any, people ever read what I write here, so I feel fairly safe saying whatever comes to mind. At any rate, I want to put down some of my thoughts on music and on life in general. This is as good of a place as any!