Where's The Music?

Okay, so there are complicated elements to building a system for music & education production. The initial goal for me was to create a vehicle to untap opportunity to teach and motivate about an experiential subject: Object oriented belief. Object oriented belief is based upon belief in God;belief isn’t mandatory for experience.

I first crossed paths with this line of thinking through the introduction of the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin into my life. I was very cautious about stepping into the world of Buddhist thought because I already had a value structure, one based upon a vague notion that Christianity was/is the revelation of God. Because of all the noise in the Western World about “Buddhism” -- most of the noise being distorted thinking/assignment of individuality to “Buddha” as person & “substitute for God” -- I spent a good deal of time getting to know certain documented distinctions within the teachings before I started to actually link my mindset to the construction of thinking that flowed by “the greater vehicle” [Mahayana] teachings through the Lotus Sutra, T’ien Tai, & Nichiren Daishonin. Nichiren’s teachings are “about” [in a wide sense] ‘fusion with the Mystic Law of Cause & Effect through sound [or teachings of the Buddha]’, as those teachings flowed from the scriptural Lotus Sutra through China & T’ien Tai to Japan. It is through the teachings of T’ien Tai that the Western mind can glean a clear vision & insight into how God operates in an environmental way that is always “living”; it was this living sense that opened my eyes -- because they were not distorted to the process of seeing the light -- to seeing the light of how God “gave birth” to the Christian trinity: The Father, the Son, & the Holy Spirit. Through dynamic fusion of life and environment [esho funi], we can see the light as a living element of our life, not as a reflection. This is a distinction which is difficult for most Christians, but is “centered” around the scriptural differences between those in a Bodhisattva life condition -- those aspiring for enlightenment -- and those in the light of enlightenment.

Too often, Christians -- who should more rightfully be called “disciples of Christ” [as they are in the American “Christian Church”] -- live as if Christ is dead. From a strict human construction standpoint [of the Christ story], those Christians deny the first Commandment, which is “love God with all your heart …”. There is a timeline in the Bible & upon that timeline, which includes the New Testament, Christ died and was resurrected, and sits with God. The strict human viewpoint adopted by the vast majority of Christians puts that Christ -- the sinless human born of a virgin, crucified & risen -- into a past which is contained in a box from/into which they view “History” & confine their religious beliefs to chosen elements of print media, or, on rare occasions post Gutenberg press, oral tradition. Christ’s life is “complete” [& documented]; there is no more “living Christ” in the human world. The only element of “living Christ” in this type of construction is the transference of intent and mindset from those who seek to understand the mind of Christ [and GOD] by their interpretation and “good works”. These type of “good works” are like those of Bodhisattva’s, but they are doomed to forever deny the living Christ in GOD because they are reflection. Reflection of light is not whole light.

The natural inclination is to get very technical about interpretation of the “living” versus “dead” point; the underlying question is more important: Can GOD reveal GOD as GOD chooses, and to whom and when GOD makes that determination? If you believe that GOD is GOD, you cannot put a box up around the housing so that the concept fits your human image. This is true for any “scriptural derived” version of divinity.

At best, we can move toward a conversation with GOD.

If GOD is creator and “King” of all that is, that is GOD is GOD, then every sub-derived particle of energy ‘under God’ is a “living piece of GOD”. This does not imply that all that we experience is godly, as there is a randomness we do not understand, and evil that is at odds with GOD’s teaching of the great commandment, the ultimate in cause and effect thinking: “Love your neighbor as yourself” [in tandem with “Love God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your body …”].

If we are to move toward a living conversation with a living God, light incarnate, we are required to truly grasp the meaning of the love GOD requires of us. We are given road maps to the journey.

To deny one road map while claiming the superiority of another is to not only put self above in judgement of GOD’s creation, but also to limit GOD to a death box of human creation. GOD is not there, not entirely anyway; the living God teaches those who travel down this or that path with interaction and response which fits the GOD given capacity to understand and apply within the framework of belief in God and the path.

Inside the trail of knowledge, there is a revelation of light. The theoretical of our sciences -- those things that are foundational to our constructions -- are fusions of creation and experience, and we follow our scientific trail [of cause and effect “proof”] as far as the logic of the math remains fixed within the theory, even when the supposed is a theory of chaos, randomness, or fixed construction. We put faith in the science, because the science is created and constructed from verifiable knowledge.

Music theory teaches us how to communicate from the randomness of sound and silence into a structured “language”. One of the aspects of music theory which has not often been discussed -- in literature & published survey introductions -- is how music is an expression of language. There is talk of how the music language is constructed, from scales & modes to melody & harmony and harmonic theories, but the throughput of that language is most often implied, left for the experiential.

Besides the point of view experiential difficulty of deciphering intent of construction and presentation, there is the a problem with ‘the silent treatment’ regarding the language of music. Perhaps “everybody knows”; perhaps, not everybody knows. Part of knowing whether music -- constructed within the structure of music theory -- as language is language specific is experiential, so to answer whether it is “a living construction” can in part be solved by experimentation: Ask multiple people if they heard the same “story”. There seems to be a general reluctance to “limit” the music by revealing the secret construction of the composer’s language into the specific of the language; how many artists have stopped short of admitting that this melody line or harmony part is a simple translation of the spoken language rhythms because they don’t want to say that it isn’t, when perhaps it was an accident of theory stable construction, or to limit other interpretations that are less tied to a specific melodic or harmonic point or point of view and interpretation.

Deep within the theory there is a construction foundation. Some believe this foundation is a structure built from GOD, the creator; some believe it is some kind of random universal attraction, a cause and effect of the temporary eternal change. Predictable change is structured change, so that is not a denial of the living GOD in the construction. Ultimately , the musical composer is in charge of the translation. The listener is “the end user composer” because the construction within is composed of a response to the sound -- just as kyo [sound or “teachings of the Buddha”] is created sound motion in our chemistry of thinking. If we have a stable construction as a listener, we have access to the language. As we “compose”, we have a part in the process of creating “the sound of GOD”. For some, that is a difficult and perhaps dangerous or blasphemous proposition. “You’re equating yourself with GOD”! Of course, denial of the fusion of cause and effect is putting GOD’s proffered freedom into a dead box and killing it; letting us participate can drive us deeper into the seeking of the latent meaning of the object construction. In the fusion of the theory and the music, there is a secondary language -- that is the construction foundation which is “human” & “of GOD”.

How close we are to constructing music that creates value in the relationship we have with GOD depends upon motive and understanding. There is a gross [as in “greater vehicle”] construction which opens the language. That gross value is latent in the music theory. Fine language can be constructed without going deeper than tuning the instrument and playing in a “pleasing way”. There is however a deeper construction that is latent in the music theory and application, a “voice leading” foundation which opens the living communication between human composer and living GOD.

The composition of music follows a set of rules in the same way that writing a novel or “producing” a film does. In fact, the rules are very similar for each process. Are there exceptions? Yes, there is an avant garde type of construction in each, sometimes those constructions don’t follow any of the rules at all, or at least “not many”, but the vast of the majority of the constructions of “music” -- music, writing, film [“movie”] -- do follow a set of rules which open the living foundational structure.

As witnesses, as people who experience “music”, we have an obligation to heed the call to open the dialogue about the construction. There are fixed elements; there are interpretive elements. Through it all, there is a foundation that is inside the theory of “the rules” of the field. When we start talking about “what’s in the music”, we start discussing something that is part of the Mystic Law, of the creation of GOD, the creator …. There is the music …

A six string path

Sometimes I grow tired of repeating the stories that I tell about the Beatles; after all, I was hardly there, right?  One of the things about those for whom the Beatles were/[are] an intense experience is that they all have a different experience of what happened (“you can penetrate anyplace you go”).  Usually, I expect that others would know the stories – that is why I grow weary of telling them, who wants to be a bore about something that wasn’t really a direct experience?  Of course, that was part of the art, that we who lived then were part of the story; the Beatles documented something that happened to us all.  The story I was telling the other day was about Astrid & Stuart Sutcliffe & how Sutcliffe supposedly didn’t like to practice bass, which was “documented” in the film Backbeat, which led to McCartney being the bass player with the band ….

Many people have not heard the recorded interviews with John Lennon [“unfinished dialogue”] & Paul McCartney [“the McCartney interviews”] that were released in the 1980’s; shame, that.  In those interviews, Lennon & McCartney both gave away many of the secrets behind the art in their time with the Beatles.  While the “secrets” are actually in the lyrics also, it was some of the story telling about what was happening in their lives that revealed how the notes & chords were working together [“we can work it out”] – the connection between the spiritual & the physical is in the language of the playing, which is why practicing is so important.  What people “hear” is what the players intimate with the lyric & the music.  The note can be a leading voice, or the leading voice can be in the chord or chord changes, even the instrumentation ….

We all [seemingly] assume that time is linear; what the Beatles opened was the non linear time of a God viewpoint – God isn’t held to the linear construction, it is we who are.  In the mind of God, we can be at any point in our linear existence.  This is something that gave rise to the concept of somebody who “passes away” – they do not die, they return to another space in the mind of God, a structure of existence [“across the universe (univearth)”] to which we do not have direct access, except in the construction that God shares in the object oriented universe [“hon-mak-ku-kyo-to”].  As long as we access the memory of the recording, we access the continuum.  Looking forward, into the future of technology & music, we can hear “Nowhere Man” and see the point – the Buddha point which is reconciled by the Cross (and the death of Jesus Christ).  By understanding the construction, we can see into the story that was/is being told.

In the McCartney interviews, Sir Paul talked about how he used to sit around the radio as a child/young man and try to figure out the lyrics and parts to the music that was coming to the UK from America.  That process has been practiced by countless musicians who learn to love music from music ….  The more that one plays and practices connecting the brain to the construction, the easier it is to move into that transcendental state of playing and composing according to the construction “rules” of music theory; and then to “see” the construction as a language communication that is live for as long as the arrangement does not pass away.

Some of the interpretation that we make of music is internal to our own imagination; in some ways music is like types in the JavaScript language for the language interpreter (as opposed to the strict types of Java or C# or other computer languages).  For the really talented constructors of music, the interpretation of the voice leading is nearly a constant – they almost tell us what to think with the construction & and the construction with the lyric.  When the voice leading is from a blues “call & response” construction, sometimes there is a strict type interpretation, but other times the decay rate of the notes (the voicing strength, the playback frequency mixing/mastering, the language in which we think – and thus the rhythm of our cadence of language [not from the musical “nashville numbering” but from the spoken voice language we have]  --) influences what we hear as the leading voice/thought/construction. 

It is these “voicings” that are still alive in the Beatles, and why we still go see 70 plus year old musicians playing songs “out there” …

getting <strike>phony</strike> AT&T …[?] {out there}

This week I was listening to some old recordings by the Beatles, and for the first time – to my ears – they sounded more tied to their era than present.  For me, the memories are passing, and the reality is moving on ….

When I was in college, a long time ago, one of the best aspects of the Beatles was that they sounded current even as they were no more.  One of the experiences that I had as I dove into the pieces of the music to figure out “why is that” [?] was to find a whole different level of both engineering – on the technical side – and lyric structure – on the music side.  There will never be another explosion like the first, and the Beatles were the first – because of the circumstances of their rise in life & the art that they presented.

As I listened to the recordings, which still can take me back to the living moments when I first heard them & experienced them, I could also hear the distance of time washing over the memory of what is in the music itself.  There were two parts of the whole aural picture that were particularly special.  While there were other musicians recording on similar machines & creating similar sounds – listen to KRTH 101 while they still feature the 60’s, and you will know – the process fed the Beatles in ways that others did not get entirely, except as observers.  Learning about how George Martin produced music was a whole historical story – a lesson to be learned – in itself.  Piecing together the lyrical meaning in context and in expanded imagination is the “other half of the sky”.  Sadly, much of the importance of what is there is being washed away, at least in America, by the current crop of younger musicians – say those born in music after 1989 ….  The view of the 1960’s grows distant, lost in the current political fringes as they fight over the outcome of that previous era.  The rise of “rap music”, which was a rejection of 1960’s & 1970’s era jazz music, has penetrated the culture of “new musicians” to the point of making celebrity the point, dollars the the point, and quality of connection to History, well, not so much the point.

I hope people won’t get so lost in today that they forget yesterday … and the stories behind it … 

It’s Already There … [Double Fantasies & Magical Mysteries]

What can we think when the chords in the natural chord progression lead us to “wonderful melodies”?  Well, first of all, we can figure out that we’ve progressed beyond thinking about the chords as we play them and have landed in “the other hand”, where the rhythm of the playing juxtaposed against the voicing can create the sound we are looking to find when we get hit by “pop music” in the first place.  Maybe that isn’t other’s experience, but it is mine.  I remember when I didn’t play music seriously; then I heard differently than I heard when I started to play for real.  It was a great awakening, something I’d probably experienced millions of times before, hearing interiors of sounds that made me wonder “are these musicians talking or ‘am I imagining this’”.  When I was purely a consumer of music, I simply allowed the musicians to lead my hearing.  When I started to think about construction of music, I started to wonder if I was building things into the songs that were merely suggestions – built in the chords – or if they were intentional.  The answer of course is that it is both or dependent upon the players’ ability or intent.  Sometimes, the rhythm of a riff can be conformed to a lyrical thought that is our own but not the original intent of the player, but often the player will have the intent to create the road that we follow.  If we have a beat that doesn’t fit our lyrical conception, the timing will wind up off, and we won’t be able to stay in the beat, in the rhythm, but even if we are in the rhythm, we aren’t necessarily following a lyrical intent of the player/composer. We can fit the timing of the song’s structure to our conception of language, and if we listen long enough with enough intent, we can learn to be fairly good at improv.  This natural “it was already there” element is also one of the reasons that the rhythms written by English speaking players can translate into other Latin languages, or even into Japanese, because, ultimately, the listener is “me Co.”, and we just need to find the right fit in the music to have our “double fantasy” come true ….

A Long Summer Since …

When I was younger, I didn’t worry about time passing, and not so much about the hurry to accomplish.  It was a long long time ago now that my hope for music as a professional enterprise entered me as “a dream for someday”.  These days, I dream real life conversations about producing music and the ideas that were inspired by God for me, but still the income … .  When I was first learning about “advanced music theory” from a French bass player / composer who was talking as a “district leader” for the SGI-USA, I knew that what God was asking me was going to confuse if it wasn’t organized well and presented in an understandable progression.  “What’s that got to do with God” & “that’s not Christian” were playing in the background even as I struggled to grasp what God was saying to me.  And then there was Country music … [ the kind Taylor Swift recently abandoned because she never played it ].

When I first hit the dance floor of the Grizzly Rose in Denver – and it’s been so long now that I couldn’t tell you the band that was playing that first night, but I could tell you I’ve seen Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Don Williams, Mark Chesnutt and plenty of others play there – I was hooked at “the big time level”.  When I was first in this music dream, I only knew ‘rock & roll’ + a little classical; it was a district member in the SGI-USA who opened the Country music vein.  There is an energy created by music that rolls in a way that people can dance or listen, catch the wave or sit in it.  When I first started to play the instrument seriously, I could get nowhere near that rolling sound.  It intimidated me.  Beyond the mess of trying to “stay on top of the instrument” – which really means processing all the fingerings & positions & progressions while and just a moment before they are being played [in order to be in the right position to lead as a voice on the instrument (or follow as a fill to a whole unit voice)] – there was a spirit world that was full of jealousies about people who could “do that”.  The spirit world wants to make the guitar something other than what it is, a stringed instrument for communication.  Some want to make it drugs, some want to make it sex, some want to make it a representation of the wealth they deny they could ever have [ causing their jealousies ], but it is just another instrument in the making of music, which is a language that can connect to God, when it rolls.

Time passes, and we start to remember the emotions we felt when this song or that was “big”, and we get a little older and we long for the time and we long for the intimacy of relationship that youth promises but age doesn’t necessarily deliver.  Being able to get on board that train as an instrumentalist is the goal.  Doesn’t everyone pray to reach the goal … [?]

Wearing an old brown shoe … [painted]

It seems to me the more I talk, even briefly, with musicians that it isn't that I am not meeting musicians, it's that I'm not meeting musicians who have the same interests in the music that I have. This has been the case for a very long – too long – time. It isn't that I don't respect the music that they're making, because I do, and I enjoy some of it fully; but there is a seeking core inside the construction that has to be part of the creative construction conversation if the musicians are going to be on the same page – and some of that conversation could (and does in some cases) come from playing together. Still, there is a deeper level of communion with God (the Creator) which cannot be assumed. The need to talk about why you would use this structure or that structure, or if the choices are musical or random, is an important part of opening the same “story” inside the construction of the music. The construction gets reflected back in the form of response; and if you come from a different perspective about the nature of the response, then you are probably going to start diverging off into varying interpretations of what is happening.

I've heard many musicians talk about their path forward to the place where they are when I meet them. I'm not lacking for people who are sure that they know what they are doing. I'm also not lacking for people who don't care about what is inside the music; generally they are “doing what is right in their own eyes”. What I have lacked is the connection to individuals who want to offer input and insight to open the doors and open the mind to the experience of the music.

It is the experiencing of the music that is the hardest subject to approach. We generally do not talk about how the music is reflected back to us as musicians – from the light into the creative process. Learning how to be a part of the interaction of the light is the key ingredient in keeping the music alive and the musician in the moment of the spirit of youthfulness which lights the creative fires. As we become more accomplished as musicians, we tend to get stuck on the same professional chains and routine like processes that other professionals in a craft do, but we are in a creative field, and there is no real excuse for not opening up our youthful spirit as long as we have energy to do so. Part of that is accomplished by recognizing that when we are stuck, we are being put into a position where we need to listen and consider the opportunity for input. This is one of the most wonderful aspects of music as the framework for “cycles” – and of course sound is measured in cyclical sound waves [of energy].

When we come together as musicians, we have the opportunity to create a framework, a foundation point in the construction of the living relationship with the music as a vehicle of God's voice and love in our world. What we poor out of our souls is what we love. We hope people will connect. When we gather with other musicians, in our best incarnations, we try to hear each other as we play, making the experience interactive – whether by a set design for the listener audience or as a free form design for the band, with the audience allowed to jump in to hear what we are talking about [with God].

Getting to the point where we begin to talk about the production of music as an extension of the conversation of the living God just might be more than most of the people I've met really want to talk about; it is something I wonder about as I “say nothing at all” while I listen to their stories ….

When I Write, I Listen [two cranes in between spotlight 29]

One of the great tension points in the creative art of “making it in the music business” comes when we fall out of the circuit of our choices, where we lead ourselves and pad our life view with friends, associates, and people who have similar views, and into “the real world”, where there are scarcities associated with choices and people who might not share the same world view start fighting for the spotlight or the microphone – something Taylor Swift found out about …(twice?). 

There is a spiritual battle in America still; it is not a race card battle, it is not even so much an “I know better” or “I am better” battle.  It is a space and resources struggle that has been going on for centuries, but was basically brought to America with the settlements.  God built the USA land like the master architect.  We don’t really have to argue about if there is God, because you either hear and obey the first commandment or you don’t. 

The U.S. is blessed with the continental divide; the divide is both a symbolic divider between “the American ‘Mid-West’” [“the East”] & the natural American West [“the West”] & a physical divide.  While we can as natives of the American West see clearly what desert life is, we also can have a particularly rewarding experience of God, reality, dependent on Earth, dependent upon water, will, & the determination to survive.

What was natural to many of the Native American tribes of the upper Ohio and Great Lakes region was pushed into the American West by the ideas that were foreign to America from God.  Natives & “Christians” moved West from the peaceful tribes.  It was a similar experience on “the trail of tears”, but not from precisely the same Earth roots.  Even this subject starts “the argument” in some circles.  That argument started way back East – maybe even at “the triumphal entry”.

And then there was “that summer” ….  We choose to speak a common language with respect and understanding, or not.  America has a special place in the world that is coming to the crossroads.  Those intersections have come about because of both American productivity and ingenuity, and the arrival of the opening hand of this time’s “ceremony in the air”.  Technology has come to us with the understanding of both the arts and the sciences, which are fused in music, and created in the constant scope by God, the giver and creator. 

Easterners and Westerners have a different experience of what God can do.  We get into our circuits and we think we have a great idea, and then we run into the reality of costs, either in human terms or in spiritual terms or in terms of expectations to which we cling.  The Puritan remnant elements – the hard Eastern Christians – act like the Pharisees, sometimes justly pointing out our lack of humility and how we don’t glorify God & serve our neighbors; the non believers & “the liberals” gather together and tell us what they think we should do.  “Hollywood” is waiting for a decision; ratings hang in the balance.  What do we choose?

Musically, the best music of the past half century has grown out of the struggle to express the personal battle between believers, non-believers, implementers [the “Conservatives” who would liberally apply their circuit rules to all of us] & improvisers [those who sit in the “liberal arts”].  It was the rise of the singer songwriter that changed where we conversed.  The singer-songwriter who connects to our personal experience most will generally get the “best ratings”.  Gradually, even as early as the 1960’s, there was a divide in American music that was directly parallel to East/West cultural expectations and experiences, regardless of personal beliefs.  That divide sunk into the politics of the nation, as “commercial art” usually does. 

The issues can be blown out to the macro level or they can be brought back into the personal level.  When a lyric (or musical phrasing) connects with a greater audience’s experience, we tend to find the territory of “hit music” – it reaches far into broad based culture, beyond or about politics.  We document God’s story in this way, because that story is “about” our life under God.

Hidden in the science of the technology that we use for recording is the map that we’re supposed to use to communicate that we are indeed a united people.  Culturally, we have our battles for the microphone & the spotlight, but it is God who is asking us “are you ready[?]”.  If we don’t teach that communication, and practice it as writers [“singer/songwriters”] we never open the whole field of the underlying “theory” which God gave us.  Music theory, particularly “western music theory” hasn’t changed since before the dark ages [or longer], but we pretend it doesn’t mean anything, or we don’t learn that the macro connection we feel as artists [either as producers or consumers and end users] or the micro is our chance to take part in the whole culture creation of value. When we understand how to apply creation of value through our communication, then we open the door to abundance.

It is my experience that God told us an incredible story, and that we tend to ignore that story because we build into our expectations a level of pride that attaches our personal expectations to not only our point of view of what value is, but also as our projection of what others “should do” and who they “should be”.  If I as a Christian challenge other Christians to open the Lotus Sutra, consider the Mahayana line of Buddhism through T’ien Tai & Nichiren Daishonin, I might be cut out of the music in “Music City” [there’s enough evidence to show that is the truth]; if I as a Buddhist suggest to other people who “practice” to consider the implications of Christ, Jesus’ death on the Cross, and how that might impact their enlightenment in life, well, I might find myself exiled to a “small fishing island” ….

As musicians, as artists, we are blessed to be the individuals who represent the greatest connection to the culture that is our human identity; we can choose to glorify our higher intelligence, or we can lose it to the sands of time.  There are many days I wonder what we’re going to choose, the living “nowhere man” or “the fool on the hill”, but then I take a step back & consider, “living classical”, maybe they are one and the same in the story, the nowhere man living in the woods [of the emotion of desire] & the fool [in his mind].  When we make music that fuses these stories, we transcend and start the dialog. 

There is so much to talk about before we read the golden version of 1984 in the land of milk and honey, where Walter Mondale [“the Russians”] are going to raise our your taxes – as the Police {policeman on the street} told us [while touring Ukraine*?].

 

*United Kingdom Russian Applications Inside Network Extensions – “Nam-Myo-Renge-Kyo” [Happy Easter?] Suggested listening [not from the Russian Album] from Band on The Run:: “1985” … .