Christmas messing about

I'm messing about with a laptop, free recording software, rubbish mic and my old harp, recording stuff trying out ideas, listening back. Very handy. This helps me to review - feel how what I arrange feels to a listener. Very useful.

I think when you're playing a melodic tradition on the harp and intending to stick within that, your main arrangement options involve ow thick you make your melody - where you place accent notes, do you add harmony lines. What makes the melody suddenly engaging, what makes it suddenly float?

Definitely fun for post-Christmas work. I might even stick some up if I like them.

Music, magic and transformation

For me, performing music is making a little bit of magic. You go up on stage, take your excitement and inspiration with you and let your skills and preparation do the work. Whether it is a huge amazing experience or something sweet and intimate, music has the capacity to take you away from your present world into another state. I feel that transformative power is real magic.

Discussing teaching with a friend last night, it was brought home to me how different teaching is to performing. Totally, completely different focus. You might need the same knowledge but you have to understand that information in a completely different way and give your attention to different levels of it. Additionally, you need your teaching skills: the relatively selfless discipline of working with someone else, in their mind, for them. Whilst on stage you are also working for your audience, but you don't have to keep a calm and controlled state in the same way - in fact it's better that you don't.

Essentially I have trained to do two things - my daytime weekday job of teaching and my evenings and weekend preoccupation of performing, of creating those magic spaces.

However distinct I've just made those two occupations sound, I feel at their heart they have a crucial similarity: that magic of transformation, the slow revealing of how the world can be a different place. Some of my favourite times are quiet morning lessons, with many small discoveries and moments of magic.

Sting even uses melodeons

Now I wouldn't normally write about Sting... but the cd was on where I was working today. I spotted Mary Macmaster's vocals on one track and so read through the cd booklet. Sting has picked a musicians list of really excellent trad players - including most of the lineup of the Kathryn Tickell band! Sweet. On earlier tracks I was thinking that's a nice groove. Now I know why!

Holidays = thinking time

Gosh. I love music, I live it, I really do and am very glad to do so. I also love teaching it but right now I am totally looking forward to the end of term. There is a huge and fascinating world clamouring for my attention. Once I've allowed it to distract me for a while then the thoughts and sounds inside me will flow easily again. I even know what I musically where I want to go next... I just need the energy and space to do so.

This term has been a huge accumulation of experiences and thoughts and planning and lessons and playing - it's been great. It's been the most fun for ages. I haven't been bored (novel). I'm just really looking forward to letting it all sift through - time to reflect on everything that's happened. I have at least half a dozen drafts of blog posts waiting to be finished. Then the important bits will sift out and I be able to see my next steps clearly.

Knowledge... like folk tune repertoire... isn't inherently perfect

I feel that knowledge is not fixed or static but flowing, evolving, changing, new parts and old parts drifting into focus or becoming fuzzy again. Forgetting, moving on, becomes just as important and absorbing new material. In fact you cannot absorb new material without having a relatively clear head - so there is a need to leave the old behind whether tunes, ideas, music or phrases. You can go through phases of things though: I obsess over a problem, solve it, move on. That's one of the points of this blog. In recording the information, the problems, I can review them then move forward.

Just like folk tunes are popularised or forgotten or changed in the fallible process of aural learning and transmission, so ideas recur or vanish or change. Some become more permanent through changes adopted in our institutions, our structures. For instance: we need lots of 2 part jigs and reels for dances that are currently popular so there are more of those tunes well known. Or we've decided that a certain kinds of intelligence are important so our higher level learning institutions only support people with those kinds of ability. The ideas may still change and flow the but the human organised traditions lock us into certain kinds of paths.

While I was growing up our modern world felt so fixed, so completed, there was nothing more to add. It seemed as if those who had gone before had some almost God-like quality - their work (musical or academic) seemed so perfect and complete in conception. I feel the world is presented to us this way as well: it should always be safe, always be complete, if it's not safe then it's the fault of someone else and you can sue them, a Nanny state.

I'm realising: a, there's no real sense of life or in life without the acknowledgement of risk; b, no information is ever complete or fixed so don't worry about it, just get a good enough method for examining and review (your own and peer review as well).

Most of my thoughts are not directly about music, but about wanting to understand the world, for myself now. I want to read much more about he great thinkers who have directly shaped the world before us: the older I get the more I see the world as shaped by people. Once upon a time I saw it all as almost divinely mathematical: you should be able to calculate almost everything, all knowledge was at our fingertips, there was nothing we couldn't know.

Bizarrely, this made me feel like there was no reason to chance anything - nothing new to learn, if you know all the information and the world is still shit why bother? Gradually I have come to realise that it's just a succession of theories - I'm not even sure we could say that the ones we have now are better than the ones that went before. With respect to our lifestyles in the West yes we can say that we live longer, we have a more comfortable existence, we can devote more of our energies to non-essential activities. Maybe this is progress but I feel something has been lost.

What is there in our viewpoint of the world that renders it so hard to live with? Now should be easy, easy yet we have more and more people especially in the Western world succumbing to mental illness, we have obesity and violence and boredom and disengagement on a massive scale. That can't be right.

What makes music attractive?

One of the defining features of folk is that everyone is a soloist. Your own stamp, your own touch is one of the most important parts of this music. It's inherent in a music where phrasing, rhythm and gesture are the defining feature - your personal touch and connection through that is of prime importance.

Of course new rhythm and gesture and phrasing types can be learnt - but still the emphasis is hugely on personal interpretation. Just like a potter, you hands help shape your music and each persons' hands are individual. Everybody can bring their own touch. When well developed it's the most beautiful thing in the world and you don't need more than that. If you do, there's generally a very specific reason.

I feel there is a parallel with this in general life - we find someone just being themselves is attractive, that being well-coordinated, being 'in' your body is attractive. Often we also find that relaxed people are attractive - that sense of ease and flow. I think music is just the same.

Attitudes to composition...

I love composition. I don't do very much of it but I am always exploring a little bit more here and a little bit more there. I have a little voice recorder to catch ideas on. It's like... there is this whole world of music to explore, some that exists already and some that you can find and make for yourself.

I was such a music nerd when I was at school, I completely absorbed the idea of the classical canon. The canon is the "approved" pieces of classical music - those which are deemed memorable by the great and good of whatever musical society you live in at the time. I dreamt of adding something to this but gradually disabused myself of the notion. What I could make didn't seem to fit with those sounds, I felt I was not a good enough musician.

Then I got to university and met the modern approach to classical composition - all experimental and strange - and that didn't seem to fit either. I didn't get the point - this didn't seem fun or creating something I felt was worthwhile. It felt like all the fire I had was put into a box and shut off.

There is such a disconnect between the act of making a piece of music and the event of it being added to any "canon" - one is all about exploration and the creative process, the other about it being "approved" by the right people.

That said, the love of "composition", of creating music never died. The desire to do it my own way has also never dwindled, but the motivation, the thought that it was worth exploring did. I still find the prospect of getting responses from other people to my music fairly terrifying, but the importance of getting such feedback is not going away but getting stronger.

I used to think composition was almost some divine process - that it was only worth doing if you created something truely extraordinary, something worthy of being part of "the canon". Now I don't. What I do think is that you reach the extraordinary through a series of small tiny steps, that to do so you need time and energy. Maybe you'll reach something you think is extraordinary - maybe you won't. Maybe someone else will think it's amazing while you're still bored and maybe exactly the opposite. Only time and a bizarre kind of popularity test will determine what happens to your music.

I am really cross with my composition teachers - especially at university - especially when it comes to judging me - mostly about not being given feedback. Why?! What do you see in one that you don't see in another? Peer review is perhaps the most important feedback you get - while it might show you up it also gives you routes to see where you might want to be. But blind peer review where someone sits in judgement and you get nothing except a number back - rubbish.

At the same time I can see how deeply difficult it is to teach composition. It's so intensely personal that any criticism is incredibly difficult to give. You have to acknowledge that you are being judged subjectively, to someone else's rules. The question is maybe why would you want to be? Certainly within the community music movement, you're taught that the only person who can truely judge how well a creation has been executed is the creator.

More and more I feel that the act of creating anything is about gathering some tools together and knowing where to go for more if you need it, then letting your instinct about the thing you are making take over. As a teacher, you can present new material and methods, suggest people devise and research their own as well, but you cannot teach the instinct. I do feel I was presented with some material but I don't feel like that the connection about the process was made at all. The bit I feel gets particularly missed is how to connect with your instinct, that your instinct is important, and that all the tools are there just to help you explore that.


I read a quote recently -

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

Scott Adams - author of the Dilbert cartoons

I like this - it includes both the idea of researching / exploration (finding your tool kit) and then exerting some kind of judgement / instinct over what to use.

Dictionary.com definition of creativity:
–noun

1.	the state or quality of being creative.

2.	the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination: the need for creativity in modern industry; creativity in the performing arts.

3.	the process by which one utilizes creative ability: Extensive reading stimulated his creativity.

I feel that "creativity" is one of those woolly terms. People can "create" something and you can think it very dull, not interesting at all. But they *have* been creative.

I also feel like something created has to have a point - it has to be written for something, for someone. It has to be fun. For me, music is like pure will - there is no reason to make other that you want to. Also, if you don't get something from it, whether interest or understanding or depth or enjoyment or whatever, there seems no reason to choose to experience it.

It can be so frustrating wanting to get to a particular place with something and not being able to find the tools to get you there. Right now I'm looking for how to get myself to a new place. I suspect I always will.