Music is so much more than just sound waves hitting our ear drums. We can literally feel music as sound waves pulse through the air and affect our bodies and influence our emotions.
What if you were deaf? Do you think that music would have no meaning to you any longer?
I have been a big fan of percussionist Evelyn Gennie ever since the day I saw the documentary about her titled "Touch the Sound." Her experience has inspired me to re-imagine what it means to listen to music and how we experience sound.
There is now a free online video of a talk Glennie gave at one of the TED events and it's well worth watching. In the video, Glennie teaches us how to listen again.
"What I have to do, as a musician," she says, "is do everything that is not [written down] in the music." The difference is between simply playing the music as it's written on the page, and "interpreting" the music, adding to the performance "the things that you notice when you are not actually at your instrument." I think the "things that you notice" could be anything about the world, yourself, your feelings, your identity, etc, etc.
The moments of our lives are increasingly PhotoShop-ped, auto-tuned, plasticized, genetically modified, and quality-controlled to the point they are not real any more. And it's especially sad to me that it has become so difficult for others to experience real music today.
I want to applaud Vancouver Symphony Orchestra conductor Bramwell Tovey for refusing to record music for the Olympics' opening ceremonies -- not that he's against the Olympics -- it's because Vanoc plans to use that recording in the opening ceremonies and have a smaller orchestra pretend to play the music that the VSO records.
Not only that, but they were going to get some other person to pretend to conduct the musicians that Tovey would have conducted for the recording. How insulting!
"My participation at the opening ceremonies was dependent upon my agreeing that music I recorded would be mimed by another individual and I regarded that as fraudulent and withdrew," Tovey told The Vancouver Sun.
I found a very interesting video on YouTube that serves as a very quick analysis of Philip Glass' music. The guy in the video is cheeky and a bit of a clown, but it's very interesting to learn about these core ideas that appear in so much of Glass' music.
Now I want to try playing some of this on the guitar.
Some of the comments on the YouTube page are a bit nasty. Some hardcore Glass fans are offended by the video's flippant attitude about the supposed "simplicity" of Glass' music. But simplicity is not a failing. Just listen to the music. There is great beauty there.
As musicians, and students of music, we work with time as one of our tools. We really and truly work in time. After all, what is rhythm other than beats spaced out in time?
And playing in time can be tricky. It means we must focus all our attention on the present moment as we play. And our present-day culture of multi-tasking with flashing, beeping things isn't helping us to practice focus in our lives.
But assuming you have turned off your cell phone before you practice or perform, one of the other main distractions is self-criticism.
If you judge the music you play as you play it, then your attention will be drawn away from the present moment. If you judge the last few notes you played, then it's highly unlikely that you will find the next few notes to be any better because you will no longer be paying attention to the present moment.
How can you focus on playing beautiful music if your attention is focused on criticizing the notes you played in the last two bars?
