I was thinking this morning about what is important to me in music. I talked about this a bit with my cellist yesterday while we were waiting for the violinist to show up. She had looked up the Clara Schumann movement we are performing Sunday and was talking about the interpretation of the players. I said that what’s important to me regardless of the style of music is that it “lives” and has rhythmic life.
I was thinking of that later after she (the cellist) said that she had an acquaintance that disapproved of professional musicians. He felt that they were depriving him of his own connection to music by insisting on learning the craft of music when it should be available for everyone and not require special knowledge or study. The violinist chimed in that she knew a young singer who had talent that would benefit from training. When my friend suggested lessons, the young singer demurred. She prefer to offer her voice as it was to God when she sang in her church.
We had come to this point in the discussion, when I explained what I say to people who think that doing 11 minutes of Clara Schumann (for example) at church turns prayer into a concert: music is a constituent element of being human and that art can lead us into being more connected to life including the life of prayer.
In response to the person who didn’t approve of professional musicians, I said that this was an act of disrespect of what music is… it trivializes it in a way that does it a disservice. Ultimately it is this lack of respect which troubles me, not lack of respect for me or my music in particular but that beauty deserves a place of honor in our lives and it takes a bit of an effort to meet it half way.
At the same time I was thinking of the fact that the new music embedded below is seen as trivial by many trained professional musicians. I’m happy to be categorized by some of them (not necessarily my piano trio players or other locals) as a bit of a hack or superficial order diazepam 10mg musician. I remember what my teacher Ray Ferguson said about listeners who told him they thought that French Classical music was trivial (“that dumm de dumm de dumm de music). He said something like he didn’t mind and still planned on learning and performing it.
There are at least two local composers to whom I have shown my compositions who have failed to respond to them. Literally. I dropped off or emailed them music and received no response. Both of these people are fine composers in their own right and are not even all that narrow. I do wonder about it but not too much. Fuck em.
I have to suspect that they have reservations about my work and not comfortable talking to me about it. Or maybe I just fall in between the cracks of their lives. I mildly regret this since I do like having colleagues. But one of the lessons life has taught me is that I am a difficult companion and colleague and that with Eileen’s love I can continue to thrive as a human who likes to make up music, music that others from both extremes might think unapproachable on the one hand and trivial on the other.
Toujours gai Archy!
Wednesday evening I was feeling depleted after disappointing myself with my rehearsal techniques at the Wednesday choir rehearsal. I flicked on this video on my YouTube stream and was immediately attracted to the groove and the sound.
Thursday night I ran across this. I quite like it. I can remember when rap began I wasn’t impressed with much of it. It didn’t seem to have a lot of music. Now you have a hip hop group like this which is entirely live and making some very cool music. I know it’s long for an embed but I like the live performance very much.
Before listening to this I played through the first six of seven two part inventions of Bach. It doesn’t seem contradictory to me to like Bach and Leikeli47. Incidentally the band is wearing TSA uniforms and Leikeli47 refers to them as the TSA band. Cool.
Hey, I’m a local composer and I’d love to see your music!
True that. Although you and I have done quite a bit of collaboration we haven’t talked that much about our compositional goals and process. Of course, we have improvised together a lot too and that’s related I think. But I will definitely take you up on showing you work when i get something more together on this organ piece I’m working on. Thanks! And thanks for reading the blog!
Very good! Looking forward to it! I can’t wait to see it!