One of the issues I've been grappling with this week is what it takes to be a musician. Granted, it's not exactly a small issue, and I have a sneaking suspicion that other people think about this more often than I do, and have a variety of opinions on the matter. But since Wednesday, when Erin and I commiserated over the "boring-ness" of people here, I feel like I've been surrounded by signs of artistry and inspiration. All of the books I have opened have magically referenced said topic, and have corroborated my opinions on inspiration, emotion, and feeling. Here's some of what I've learned so far:1) Great musicians are not great because they have technical facility or play in tune. They are great because they are artists, probing into "that almost indescribable realm of human depth." (Mastery of music, 7)
2) Music making can be thought of as mastery of technique, performance, and SELF. If you are on a journey to discover yourself and where you fit in within the world, and you long to communicate such an experience, you will affect people.
3) Artistry is such a loaded term. It's kind of a bullshit way of describing something that words cannot really do justice to. But we all (or many of us) can think of it in our lives. We can think of a time when a piece, a concert, a performer moved us to a place we hadn't been to before. We can think of a book, a painting, a play or movie that changed our perception of time, space, and the present. Artistry is undefinable, yet palpable.
4) Why do music? Why do any art? Because you have to. Not because it's lucrative (hardly), not because it sounds pretty (not always), not because it's what you're good at or it's easy (definitely not). You do art because you have to. On Thursday, on the way back from getting my car's oil changed, I heard an interview with Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries, in which she said, "I write songs because I have to. It's a process of getting inside myself-do I need to see a shrink? Maybe. I'll write a song about those issues." Peter Maxwell Davies said, "if nobody remembers my music ten years after my death, it won't matter...I compose because it is an ongoing process of self-refinement." Music making is as much of a process, and even though we don't actively create things in the way a composer does, we should be no less inspired, creative, and thoughtful. And yet, here and now, music making in the incubated environment of college is droll and lifeless, stale, and emotionless- people are filled with sawdust dreams, spewing empty words, with vacant eyes and a static heart of constancy. How can I, an inconsistent person with so many thoughts and feelings, scarred emotions and skin, compete with the hollowness? I don't know, but I try.
5) Bobby McFerrin has a beautiful quote which summarizes what I want from music, from art, from all things:
When I go to a concert, I don't want to leave the hall the same way I entered. I want transcendence. i want something to happen to me in there, so that when I elave the hall, I've been touched in a deep, deep way-by magic, by some holy accident. I'm singing this song, and all of a sudden I hear this voice in the balcony singing along with me. Something happens which makes people feel they have been asked to step outside themselves a little bit, to help create the musical space. That's what I want, and I think that is what everybody wants.
I've felt this so many times at popular music concerts- a moment when the crowd and the artist communicate as one thing, when a song touches everyone in a way they had not predicted, when you feel a deep inexplicable love for the performers, the audience, for the world. This is what I want to communicate. This is what I want to evoke, to create. Art has the power to change you-so why are people just fucking around here? I don't know. But I'll keep searching for it, for transcendence.
Quotes of note:
The light shines in darkness and the darkness has not understood it.
Nothing is better than music. When it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful lives; it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bring us back pure and new to what was, what will be and what music has create for us. -nadia boulanger
Music making is constructed of correct notes, correct rhythms, dynamics and articulation. But the mortar is human trust of self and others, belief in self and others, and love of self...if one believes that music is self-expression, then it should follow that one must have aself to express. Before one is able to conduct and evoke artistry...one must spend a considerable amount of time on oneself, on one's inside stuff.
awareness is a necessary condition for the artist in the world. Without awareness, there can be no growth, little honest music, and little love.
...many times, there is something missing in the sound: that something which provides a brilliance of color and accuracy of pitch that is unmistakable if one is listening. What is missing? What is missing to those who really listen is a humanness to the sound. A sound that is born because of the conductor's selflessness and understanding of human love through music.
-james jordan
currently listening to: the department of eagles. soooo good.
2 comments:
"And yet, here and now, music making in the incubated environment of college is droll and lifeless, stale, and emotionless- people are filled with sawdust dreams, spewing empty words, with vacant eyes and a static heart of constancy."
did you feel like it was that way at nec as well? i'm trying to figure out if school is so much worse than professional life. because, in a way, school enables you to entertain all sorts of wild fantasies about the art you will create and do that life in the "real world" will squash pretty quickly and forcefully unless you've got some kind of impenetrable will and vision.
idk, maybe i'm in a weird place right now. but i feel like whenever i go back to nec or around nec students i feel like i see this rosy blindness, or at least remember it in myself-- years when i was permitted to only dream, to only work toward dreams. i feel like so many of them will shortly realize they are somewhat ill-equipped to deal with many things in life. but maybe the dreams are the hardest to nurture and keep alive, so it's worth focusing on. the rest will come, or something like that.
who knows.
I actually didn't feel that way at NEC- I often felt that people might actually like music. here, there are people who do it because it's all they can do, and they don't necessarily do it well. There are a lot of boring unengaged musicians here, which is a true disappointment. I'm all for combining practicality with artistry and dreams of success. You have to have the dream of creativity, the spark of interest in order to not succeed. If you have no spark, then there's nowhere to go. College is one of those few times when you can dream- so why not work hard and live the dream? I'm at the end of the dream, and I usually worked towards combining the dream with reality, but I still have dreams about communicating with people through music, which is a timeless one. I can see both sides of the coin, but to be a boring uninspired musician or person even is unfortunate.
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