Category: music

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Meta music

what music

if you listen to Beethoven – or to Mozart – you see that they are always the same. But if you listen to traffic you see it’s always different.

John Cage

What kind of music do I like? Many different. What kind of music do I make? Many different? Sometimes I come up with music that sounds like what I hear in my head. Sometimes I come up with music that is something very different.

Reading this past paragraph I am tempted to call my music differential. Perhaps the most important characterization is, that the outcome is much less consistent than the process of making it.

When you find a new scale, it will reach your perception in a specific way. It is possible to get into a dialog with your fantasy. Then out comes some result. I try to make this result be beautiful. Voila, some music.

Maybe you will now play your creation more often; or make more creations with the same scale. Every time you use this scale, and when you play your music, your inner dialog continues. If you play for an audience, the dialog is enriched by the experience of the feedback-loop between the performer and the audience. A year later, when you play the piece of music from the previous paragraph, your experience of it will have changed.

If you try to be most true to your original music, a decision needs to be made: Whether you go for the same combination of musical notes, or instead go for a similar dialog with your fantasy.

I consider the physical vibration of air molecules as medium, through which music is flowing. Music itself exists in our consciousness. To be more specific requires a common understanding of metaphysics. Such common understanding is not known to me.

I like music that comes from the heart of people. I like music that resonates the way I want to be. I like peace, funk, beauty, humor, depth, observation…

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Meta music stuff on the internet

a thought on pedagpgics

watching this video triggered some not so brand new comparisson I hold in my synapses:

This awesome dude explains music theory. He explains the most basic building blocks, how they add up to the next level (#1f4a9;) then suggests to practise permutating all possible permutations of the blocks we have just learned. More on that in a bit.

During my first year in university I was attending Tibetan and Chinese language courses. In the Tibetan class we first learned the alphabet. Then we learned what syllables (Tibetan writing is heavily syllable based) can be written with this alphabet. Only after that did we learn simple sentences, like “the Lama is wondering where he put that holy grail again”.

Forgive me my cynicism, but the absence of an alphabet in Chinese language made it so much more accessible. For the first 15 minutes or so of our lecture I don’t remember hearing a single word that was not Chinese. We witnessed 我学中文 being written on the blackboard. Our textbook started with “Mama, Papa, Sister, Brother, this is, that is,…” Needles to say, Chinese was much easier to learn.

As a teenager I got more fascinated with my fathers guitar, than when I was younger. In order to learn it I picked up a songbook, which had shapes of guitar chords printed on top of the melody lines of well known songs. In the beginning it took ages for me to put my fingers in the right places, but after some practicing I didn’t need the pictures anymore. The chord names became enough.

Two different approaches of learning/teaching have been described now. First two examples of a systematic approach, using some basis that can be agreed on to be The Basic Building Blocks. And two of an approach that holds cultural experience to be more important than the systems that have been used to describe them.

Personally, I find it important to use both. As they both have their strengths and weaknesses.

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music reactions

Mori Kante

Yeke Yeke, what long instrument, strums there, what a crew and what a performance. Rest in peace, Mori Cante.