What Could Become …

The point of trying to create an Education + Production System is built from a type of practicality from my experience.  I have been studying music for years; studying has included intensive playing as well.  One of the problems I've faced along the way is the "what for" of the music. 

I know that there is the "we enjoy hearing the music".  There was an attraction to the question 'what makes this song pull people into it'?  The music fits a type of construction.  Theory sits inside the foundation of the construction.  When I started to understand the theory, I started to look for why does it matter?  There must be something more, right?  Perhaps, perhaps not.  There have been musicians throughout time that didn't think that their music was something more, in fact some of them went out of the way to deny that there was anything other than a sound, an emotional expression.

I came to music late in life compared to my peers -- I floated around it as a child, not in it, and as a young adult I floated with it, not in it.  It wasn't until I started to realize that studying music was opening up the "story" of the peculiarities of my brain, and my brain issues, that I became devoted to trying to understand.  They say that adult learning is difficult.  They say that we tend to lose our ability to learn new things.  When I was younger, I used to think that that outcome was probably built from desire to learn as much as it was from the ability.  I kept teaching my body how to play an instrument -- guitar -- and yet my mind was nearly constantly challenging me to remember what it was I was learning physically.  

Reading music is not natural for me; in fact it is probably worse than learning a foreign language other than English, which is hardly foreign to the America we know today.  I've approached it as a process.  Know the notes and chords intuitively, and without really thinking about it while you are playing, and reading notes will follow.  This is not exactly the same as the immersion that others use, but it is part of the whole process of learning to get to the point where "music city" as I've envisioned it really is "music city".  What is that?  It is the place where a score sheet is all that is necessary for a "band" to play together the "right way" the first time ....

Music education is not just about reading music, except for some.  The limiters are like the musical artists who say that their songs don't have any other purpose or meaning than to express an emotion.  The music educator who knows how to read music and says that music education is "about music" is either hiding the truth for a reason or is just lazy about education.

Music education is about learning, communication, and knowledge.  The beginning of education comes from understanding how music score sheets, the Grand Staff came about.  It is when we start to open 'music city" from that perspective that the world can begin to change, when we can be empowered by the music, music we create & music we listen to ... .  It is when we open the music this way that we can begin to sense what could become.     

Rebecca Ryan plays keyboards …

One of the things that needs to happen this year for me is that I need to make some music with others.  This is not something that is just a want, it is a need.  There comes a point when the music idea is either a total waste of a life -- when it has overtaken your life for decades -- or it becomes something that represents your abilities, insights, and self.  I started "studying" music in the early 1980's; prior to that, I listened to music more than my peers, but I wouldn't say that I had studied music.  As I was introduced to Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism, & it fused with my whole view of faith, I started on a path that came to a split in 1997, when the golf "instructor" employment "fell through".  Golf was not even then really me; my heart was still in the music, and when the golf ended, the music path was natural.  It was not easy.  I had to go from being a fan to being a real musician, and because I had spent all those years preparing, I had a clear idea what that entailed.  One of the best lessons I learned while learning about Golf instruction was that being able to show somebody the physical thing you are talking about becomes important when you are talking about raising the level of performance to that of a professional.  I could do that in golf to a greater or lesser extent because I was naturally gifted from childhood, I just wasn't that great a player because I seemed to move too much in the middle of the swing, something which I later figured out as more a spiritual issue in the viewpoint of the swing than something I could have done anything about.  To make a change in my swing that would have been necessary to be a great player -- a successful tour player -- I would have had to make certain changes in my swing that would have put stress on my back in a way for which I was already compensating.  I simply could not generate more rotation without putting more stress on my body.  Eventually, I learned hoe to control the urge to try to over-rotate, but that was after or near the end of the golf experience.  With music, the key is connection between the brain & the fingers.  By switching to that, I was able to open the field.  I already had developed "the ears", as I had spent much of the 1980's in the music production environment around "friends" from the SGI-USA, and my interest in figuring out if what I was hearing was what they were intending or if it was a "latent add on" never stopped growing.  

There was a feeling that came for me when I heard good music.  When I started to play [for real], I started to look for ways to create the sound that I had heard that created the feeling.  I began to study the ways the sound could be applied as an extension of the notes [frequencies] because the emotions that come with "the sound" often come as a result of the links that grow into the music -- particularly if the connections are latent because of the listener's attachments not because of the musicians' intent and design.  I went through about a ten year period when I tried to play about 4 hours (or more) a day.  I was always looking for -- in my ears -- that place of connection between hearing and playing, an improvisation that was naturally part of the flow of the music.  During that period, I went through peaks and valleys of the four stages of learning -- something learned from the golf ventures : unconsciously incompetent (the sound is not meshing, and you don't know the key progression) >> consciously incompetent (the sound has a millisecond separation that is not fused, & you still don't always know the key center or the mode) >> consciously competent (you might or might not be fusing, but you're close enough to the back-beat structure that you can record and hear what you intended, & you recognize the modes when you are playing, even if you might not remember them after the song is over) >> unconsciously competent (you hit enough to not be worried about embarrassment at an improv session & you know the key centers and can think up mode switches naturally).  The real advancement for me in my playing came when I read specifically about the CAGED system; I had seen the chord structure of the CAGED system, & I had learned the modes off of the chord structures, but how those structures were really connected in mastering the guitar had always been presented out of order in some way.  The presentation of extensions is key to whether the caged system is understood or not.  If you "get" the extensions, everything falls into place easily; if you struggle with the extensions, you need to reground in the caged structure, getting back to the basic root-third-fifth with 6ths and 7ths.  

When you are grounded in playing, the "extension" into "shells" becomes much simpler to move into and through.  The feeling I felt was always tied to that "rolling thunder", even when the thunder is one note or silence.  There is a "visual center" in the produced music.  That visual center comes through the rhythm of the parts or notes working together.    This is what I was trying to get to the point of "showing", because there is a feeling involved when the music can reach the audience by being "seen" as it is "heard", and in this I mean in an entirely audio setting, not in the sense of visual media.  This idea of a visual center inside the music performance became clear to me as I went through the years of listening and watching very good (tight) bands play together.  It later grew into questions about engineering focus and practices that had been part of the original involvement I had with music -- music engineering school in the 1980's, which lasted about two weeks because of the speed they were going (& expecting me to master the information, which I'd never had or seen in high school [at least not that I recall .-(  ]).  I'd had what I thought at the time were some "crazy revelations", ideas that fit with the religious theory & the music theory, but which were definitely not part of the specific requirements of the University track.  I understood, through time, that for some instructors, their belief was that the information was "secondary".  The information was either "latent", in which case the student was better off knowing the grounded level of the application of the latent attachment, or it was just not practical to pursue because of the number of sidebars in the allotted teaching time.  The "thunder" comes from the connection of the timing of the visual center motion and the swings in dimensions beyond the two dimensions of mono-stereo music.  The shells and extensions are ways to create full bodied sounds inside motion without having to go through the whole structure of chord construction and placement (voicing); and those shells are also part of the whole greater construction of music motion in the engineering.

Truthfully, I've not to this day -as I produce this writing- ever heard a discussion with an engineer who would admit to the level of connection that I had grown to experience, and which had been the draw for me back from golf into the music field.  The whole of object oriented engineering is like a process of extension production on the instrumentation.  This is, when you consider it, natural to the way that God designed the structure of the science.  We hear sound in a certain way; that variance in sound is measured in frequency changes and rhythm changes and volume changes.  As we get into the whole picture (whole frame) production, we start to open the way of understanding the nature of the thought of electricity, at least according to the theory.  When we do that, the natural extension should lead us back to a question about Christ, and what exactly did he mean when he said "I go before you to prepare a place" ....  The reason this is important becomes clear as the discussion evolves through the various stages and points of logic, beliefs, and practice -- theoretical proof, documentary proof, & experiential proof.  Perhaps this will be the year ... 

 

{Oh, and in case you missed "the bullet train point" in the title [Rebecca Ryan?]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trouble_%28band%29

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