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” … .

  

The Bridge [out of nowhere]

Sorry it’s been so long since I most recently posted here; it’s difficult being in a “life recovery program” and squeezing in all that needs to be done.  When I moved to Nashville from Los Angeles nearly five years ago now, I did so knowing that I was going into uncharted territory for me.  I was diving into an area of “music production” that was unfamiliar to me so far in my life.  It was a challenge for me, from me, to find out if God had fulfilled the meaning of “Music City USA” that had been revealed to me through the years of preparation in California, Colorado, Florida, and other places as well. 

I wasn’t a natural musician; I learned to be as natural as God allowed me.  What I mean by that is that I was never good at memorizing songs or reading music as a child, and my practice time – which existed – was mostly made up of toying around with what different sounds sounded like together.  When I moved to Florida in the mid-1990’s – ostensibly to teach Golf at a Golf School – I started on a new journey.  Music was put center as my communications link with the Creator, and I left Florida, cut out of the Golf business [a month into a “six month trial”], with a search for answers to questions that had been brewing inside me since the early 1980’s when I had started conversing with my musician friends in Los Angeles.  Those friends were introduced to me mainly through the practice of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism in the Soka Gakkai International–USA; I also had a nomadic music curiosity around the then L.A. “pop music” scene.  Then, I was driven into “country music”; by the 1990’s I was entirely country, with passing “pop” awareness.  That centeredness had led me to studying “what is this business”?  I found the road in through computers and the rise of digital equipment.  When I started to link the concepts between personal & network computing and broadcasting & recording, I started to understand a calling.  Part of the lesson I learned in the golf business was that if you really want to TEACH, you need to be able to SHOW.  I went to work, hard, to become a “natural musician”.

I studied as much music theory as I could get my hands upon – in books – and which I could comprehend – in mind.  Music is not a mechanical thing of the mind, it is best as an expression of feeling, but it is a feeling that has rules that allow the freedom of the expression.  It was through the grasping at how we communicate our understanding of God through music and artistic recording and expression that I came to have a mission to understand “where is this business now”?

The “business” side of Los Angeles entertainment is full of all kinds of lessons.  There are really good people, some who are highly competitive and will show you nicely why you aren’t prepared for ‘the business’; and there are egomaniacs and not so good people who just want you out of the way.  Either way, generally, those in the business don’t want new competition.  They go out of their way to “crucify’, in a worldly, fleshly, sense those who would be their next competitor.  In most ways I suppose, this is no different than other competitive businesses where people are competing to feed a family.  The “secrets” of Hollywood are available to be learned, but it is generally a controlled learning process.

Nashville has long been a center of the Christian based publishing industry, but what that industry is has remained somewhat a mystery, just something which occurred and was accepted rather than something that was quantified and qualified.  If “Music City USA” had a difference from Los Angeles in terms of “advantages in the recording industry”, it was that the musicians had a reputation for coming through the publishing arms of the nations Christian thought machines.  If we are a Christian based nation, and art is supposed to represent the leading edges of thought, then it is important to understand the context of Nashville as “Music City USA”, and to incorporate it into the art produced.

While I’ve battled some health issues that slowed me during the past three years, I’ve also been blessed with a learning environment in Nashville.  What I’ve been able to learn is that God is always at work, but that God’s people don’t necessarily understand what God is doing, particularly when it comes to art, communications, and music.  Artistically, we push envelopes and we get into heated areas of debate that expose the size of the egos involved and the desire to be first, to put “me first” “I” first, and the more “Christian” you become by studying, the easier it is to see, as a witness of people who think they are relating to God or being instructed by God.

Over the years, I’ve developed from the perspective that it is best to start from  ideas of “what would you do that is different” ( and/or generally beyond)  what is already being done.  I was fortunate that I learned “tricks” of the golf business which taught me how to listen for God in the simple things that are right before our eyes, the “latent meaning” inside the construction of the art and the science of the task.  When computers and musical arts converged for me, the whole picture production came into view.    It’s simple, and complex. 

The hardest part of trying to “produce” this conceptual framework as a working production model has come from the abundance of people who are certain that they know what they are doing is “it” or that they know what it is that I would do.  I can’t say how many musicians I’ve listened to, some who are considered ‘top line professionals’, who really are not producing music even close to the line of the theory that God had in mind when he showed it to me … .  I’ve heard too many people who plug in their electric instruments without giving a second thought to why you would do that; I’ve heard too many songwriters who know the form of the genre format they want to work, but who are actually displaying that they are lucky not good, because there is no substance to the music they make within the theory that is God’s instruction book for music creation.  Yes, they hit some relevant points, but they fade because they are using a formula which is designed to be expanded as a “startup” point not an endpoint.  Sometimes I wonder if they’re even listening to themselves.  Sometimes, they get the formula right and the music is not bad, but ask where is it going, what’s next, and you’ll get a blank stare.  “That’s all there is”!

I realize that it is best to let those musicians go there own way.  I realize that the way that I’ve learned the approach is not the path that others have used.  Still, I can’t help but wish that somewhere – and soon – I’ll connect with even one other musician who wants to write with a God centered program for production of relevant contemporary and longer lived, at least in aim, music.  How egomaniacal is that?  Well, … .  The discussion is grounded in the reality of many of those temporary hits that aren’t actually as good when they’ve been played a few thousand times or when they are played back from the “new perspective series” in a week, a month, a year, or a decade or two. 

Part of humbly seeking the right dialogue includes letting the people who are sure God isn’t opening a door – here – think about the bridge they are crossing … . 

After all, “… he’s a real nowhere man …”!

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

}

This is music city, right?

Each day I get just a little more amazed by the experience here.  This is “music city”, right?  Well, I was confused before I came here, but not in the way that many people are.  I knew the politics of the music industry, and I knew what the potential was for the political crossing between “Church politics” & “industry politics”.  I knew what the upside potential was, what could be if the industry was deserving of the type of money and cash flow that was being attributed to it, but I didn’t know if they were actually doing the things that seemed obvious to me.  I knew that my musical friends in Los Angeles – where I’d been involved enough in the music & religion mix in the 1980’s to understand what I didn’t know – weren’t going to be interested in changing something because it was the right thing to do, the moral thing to do.  I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just real.  The money in the Los Angeles music scene is driven by the money and the money only, and moral attachments are a question that just aren’t linked, unless they are linked [primarily to income stream], but that might be another question, depending upon whether you have a patent or a valid copyright on that process to make money [in which case, we’re all ears .) ].

Music is viewed as a disposable income business by people outside the industry itself.  This is news to those who are making money in the business, but the distance one is from the music business, the more disposable the product is, particularly when it comes to the question of say eating or paying for housing, or music(?).  “Why gosh, I’m broke with no place to live, I think I’ll spend my last $100 on a new Epiphone guitar”.  The question regarding “why is the music industry worthy of any income stream” is a valid question, except for those who sit in the mid-levels of a protected space in the music industry.  In the beginning, music was worth something because it was worth something – even for those to whom it was just a job that fit into their lifestyle when they didn’t know what they were going to do with their life, [and even more so “to honor God”(?)].  Non Christians generally might miss the “in the beginning” part there, but I’m fairly certain those who have at least read the Bible know that “in the beginning” was a major story told twice … .

Really, what is not a disposable income industry in cities?  People get lost to the idea of how hard it is to feed, cloth and house billions of people on Earth year after year ….  So what good is music?  Sure it’s nice entertainment.  Entertainment is not enough.  The entertainment business has to be something more than just keeping eyes glued to the latest marketing gem or the worst rated network talk show in prime time on cable ….  There is a network, and a product, right?  Only we lose sight of that product the deeper we go into the cities, and the bigger the city is, the harder it is to see out into the rest of the world, where there is simply no interest in that product [name whatever product you want].  Music without music education is just more marketing noise; but that’s what is driving “Music City”, no?

What is music?  It seems like a simple or an idiotic question at first, but like I said, I‘ve not been confused by the same things that others have been.  I thought that music to a lawyer for instance was billable hours …, or for a Surgeon Doctor a long but simple surgery ….  Music for a Church Music Director is apparently entirely involved in the Church Choir, unless you happen to choose a “contemporary worship service” where the music could be on your k-fish station [or possibly your k-frog syndicate, unless cancelled by Marrissa Mayer in her attempt to drown Yahoo in so much debt and confusion that nobody can figure out why the Yahoo pages and services aren’t as good as they used to be].  Launchcast, gone because it isn’t turning a profit?   Music is many things, have a baby, send the baby to a swing set a few years later and see if that doesn’t create some music ….  “Swingtown, Wi-eee!!” [I don’t want a divorce, Susan].  Happy or sad music director at the Church?  I moved to Nashville, “Music City USA” because there is only one place in American Music development where the crossroads between God & Music as Industry cross with the outcome being Music no matter what happens.  Music is the noise that makes you happy while you try to swing over the bar on the swing set.

I keep hearing the haunting echoes of the last few weeks of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson – and that would be either the Johnny Carson who worked beside Mr. Ed McMahon, or the son of the father of a child born while John F. Kennedy was President – and I know that something is missing.  I loved the education I received from “Johnny Carson”, all the way down to the night he brought the silver anniversary show to Burbank, and considered announcing his retirement live on the air as a surprise gift for NBC ….  And then there was the chance to do it again, “just for Hollywood”.  I know, I was there, I saw the light.  “Here comes that rainy day”?

So what stopped Johnny Carson from stopping the show right then?  I thought they’d know when we found the Nashville Rescue Mission, but apparently, well, there you go again [local]:

“People Of Earth” … ….

 

 

 

 

 

       

      

   

Thinking Backwards–Music From the passion play [golf ball included]– [does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?]

Since it was announced that President George W. Bush will be on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on 11/19/[13], I began wondering, as I often do, about the intentionality of “art” and “broadcasting”.  Is former President Bush making a statement, that “there was one 9-11, and it was bad luck”?  Perhaps it’s a coincidence.  Perhaps it is “God”, also a “United Methodist” at work, or at least an artistic social secretary for either the President’s club – “we’ll give you three days warning Mr. Kennedy” – or simply a Tonight Show booker who knows the irony of it all in the aftermath is just too much for some people to understand.  Maybe God makes it all different when he does his annual review?  That is a concept that makes the release of the 2nd volume of the Beatles Live at the BBC – with its “new material” – such a treat to ponder in the music and broadcast business.  How do you get to the English Garden anyway?  Take the Broadcast Syndicate [TBS?]  “People of Earth, NBC has made me so filthy rich that I don’t care if there is another network show that interrupts my life with my wife or not, but I cannot say that Tonight, at least not without consulting with Late Night host Jimmy Fallon ….  Jimmy sent me an email [suspicious domain] that said”:

Sitting in an english garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don't come, you get a tan
From standing in the english rain.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob goo goo g'joob.
Expert textpert choking smokers,
Don't you think the joker laughs at you?

And then it all went “Live from …” ?  Music is odd when it comes from the real place, or the studio where Milk & Honey merges with the best dulcimer player we can find on the streets of New York, today, right now, before the sun sets. 

People of Earth, you are current ….

Thus I Heard; Music Linguistics and the Small C catholic church

I’ve been part of the dialogue about music now for well over thirty years – the dialogue on the professional level, the part that includes advanced music theory on “faith” and “belief”.  There is one core element that many musicians seem to find hard to get past initially when they are taking part in the discussion about this specific area of music theory: “God”.  The Buddhism of The Lotus Sutra & the great teacher T’ien-T’ai, and the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin all lead the musician involved with certain specific advanced music theory concepts to the questions, “is there God” & “do Christians recognize the living God” [the transcendental].  The whole discussion will [I hope] be opening up soon, as I am personally in need of a “real job”, or should I make a better cause and say “real employment”[?], but here below is a part of a piece that I hope will be “part of a straw that stirs the drink”:

 

Music Linguist as conduit for Church Participation

The idea of a music linguist is somewhat hidden in latent structure of the foundation of music. The equal temperament “Western tuning” standard is thousands of years old. The base structure of “the Church Modes” is standard across music theory as the core foundation of the dialogue that occurs inside the music vein of living. The “Circle of Fifths & Fourths” is a standard that exists across all forms of music genres that fall within standardized Western music – “Eastern music” generally uses Western forms, but can also add dynamic elements to tuning which complicate the theory [One explanation of "1 cycle [resolution]" tone differences  {Michigan Technical} ] [ Another explanation of tuning {Wiki-pedia} ], but return into “the fold” at certain levels of advanced dialect upon the theory. There are three basic levels of “linguist orientation”:

1. Object oriented whole process – the 1-7 chord function and theory at whole octave state.

2. Note Function process – the theoretical language of the notes of music [in music state].

3. Note object function – the “language” of the notes in their relative object state [music function, language function, relative object function].

These functional design objects are really much simpler than they sound at first. When reaching out to a base audience, and particularly for the purpose of outreach and education, the objects are things like genre, emotional theme, and rhythmic function orientation. While the first and most basic level is “simple”, the complex levels are more deeply involved in the application of advanced music “theory”, recognizing that the motivation for this specific path of education outreach is specifically for the purpose of broadening and deepening active faith based participation in music as a link between [cultural] arts & [cultural] science. If we are not teaching how to “see” the science in the art, we lose some if not all of the relevance of the art. The art itself is an aural communion, part of the science of the teachings of God, who is “heard”.  At least, “thus I heard” ….

‘Tuning Sharp’ Is Like Jamming ‘In Tune’

Perhaps there is a secret; I’ve often wondered why I see other musicians “retuning” their instruments – and here I am talking mainly about guitar – when there was nothing in particular that would have changed the tuning.  I think we sometimes hear the harmonics in motion, but I have no proof of it, although, that is kind of one of the points of ‘sound in motion’ & “controlling it”.  We want to hear so specifically when we are playing the stringed instruments that we start hearing the reverberations more than the whole tones, and our tuning sense starts to grow “sharp”.  The natural tendency when this happens is to tune the instrument “up” a little, like disciplining, like tightening a belt to hold the pants closer to the hip. 

In some senses, there is little importance to “being in tune” with the whole tone frequencies, the pure sound of the Western Scale [equal temperament] that we know and base so much of our music upon.  The guitar is tuned “relatively”; as long as the strings are in the right relationship, the sound can be made decent.  If it is a band, and they tune relative to each other and in the same relationship, there can be an additive element to being “out of tune” together.  Still, there is the natural artist guitarist/musician living within; it is hard to believe that the sound is right when it is not “classically tuned”. 

There was a time in my life when I used to wonder which way the frequencies were going to go; I had to think, if that sound is “below” this sound, I need to tighten/loosen the string to find the right relationship.  I used to be amazed when I was often wrong even though I thought I understood tuning the instrument.  What I found out over time was that my ear developed toward a few cents sharp, and when I was tuning, I often wanted to tune to the next harmonic sharper, even when loosening the grip was really what was needed.

I think tuning sharp is a somewhat natural thing for tightly wound musical artists, but I don’t know for certain because I have had so few opportunities in my long pursuit of professional level music to actually sit and discuss experiences and theory with other players, particularly opportunity where there isn’t a fight going on over what is right or wrong, just a discussion of what “your experience” is.  I’ve heard countless players in my days in Los Angeles, Denver, & Nashville with whom I’d love to talk about their playing, because I think I almost hear something, but I know from hearing them talk, from hearing them present their playing [& writing] that there is a strong likelihood that as soon as we started to talk about my experience questions, the barriers would go up as they try to protect the ways they justify to themselves the ways they have adapted to cover their pursuits as they are, not as they could be in music.  There is a wall, a decision barrier which protects them from having to break down their thinking so that they can open up their feeling and become more conscious of their “sharp” playing.  Tuning sharp is like jamming out in tune.

I began to think about all this pretty seriously this past month [after I was recovering from some surgery, and perhaps a small dose of fever/cold which was influencing my hearing?] when I finally “broke” the neck of a favorite guitar.  I was doing a little cause and effect investigation – I was playing in a different tuning environment than normal [a different room with different acoustic properties] – and I was still using a tuning fork as my guide, but I noticed after the neck broke, first, the guitar, which I had been using for well over a decade, had always been at risk for a neck break because the grain of the wood at the tension point was wrong for high tension tuning; second, I noticed that when I have “a cold/flu season ear”, I tend to ramp up even sharper ….  I know this is something that I’ll have to protect against in the future to diminish tension on instruments [and budget].  I had known from the start that I was stressing the strength construction of this guitar, but it had been years since the wood in the guitar had fought back by saying “I’m not that strong”.  I hadn’t even broken any strings in so long that I couldn’t recall the last time I had done that, although when I first had the instrument, that was an issue as I “wound tight”.  Part of the reason there had been no broken strings was because I’d learned the limits of the instrument and the amount of tension that the instrument could take.  In this case, the strings didn’t break, the grain of the wood gave way and the neck broke at the headstock.  It could be repaired, but there are issues, obviously.

Still, I am left wondering, do the frequencies play with us  -- “the spirit world” – or do we play with them?  It is a wondrous thing tuning sharp …      

I want to play, but there’s no room …

I’m sitting in a coffee shop listening to music playing in the background.  Usually it sounds good, sometimes the mood is inappropriate, sometimes it hits dead on; I suppose what hits you as good depends upon your life condition at the moment.  I’ve been in more than a few coffee shops, many of them Starbucks, some of them not Starbucks.  I’ve never seen a band play at Starbucks, but sometimes I’ve been able to get a sense of the adrenaline rush that comes from hearing good LIVE music in a setting where it is worth being.  I loved going to the Hotel Café in Hollywood before it was ruined by the publicity Carson Daily brought to it; no matter I wasn’t in Hollywood when that day happened, and maybe if I move back “home” someday, the place will fit again. 

I have no place to play music at the moment; it’s winter, and the back seat of my car is a limited space.  Over the summer, I managed to play in the park nearly each morning, going through a routine of scales and chords and trying to get what I call “on top of the instrument”.  On top of the instrument means that the brain processes the notes and chords and the sound that is produced and projected at whatever speed you are playing.  In sports, it’s called “in the zone”; even when I was more a sports participant than a musician, I believed that it was possible to practice to the level where “in the zone” was a natural state of mind achieved through effort, repetition, and focus.  There were days when I was younger when I was able to hit a baseball from in the zone – I spent two whole seasons hitting near “.500”, but then I lost my ability to do that and turned to golf, where I learned how to think mechanically about body motion at a speed faster than the brain could tell the body while still thinking that the brain was telling the body.  Playing music is like that – it often is happening right in front of you at a speed you couldn’t really comprehend if you weren’t in a form of suspended mind body connection that is akin to muscle memory.  You’re really hearing a voice tell you about what your body has already done, but you perceive it as being simultaneous.  Hopefully, the audience will hear what you think you hear – as that is the test. 

That sound, that connection, that is the source of the adrenaline rush – for the listener & the player.  It’s worth a cup of coffee … and a place to play in a “music city” …    

Market Share

This morning I was reading about market share; the story started out talking about how Wal Mart had taken nearly a quarter of the market in the U.S. in one of the aspects of its business which was an expansion of its core business, retailing.  Immediately, I began to think about the Music Industry.  People say that the Industry is more open than it ever was before because of the Internet and the various ways to distribute music digitally.  Actually, I’m one of those people who believe that you can make your way in the music business without having to really work inside the industry corporations.  I believe it only to the extent of some severe limitations.  You can play the note, and maybe you can make a living from it, but the industry is going to be playing the chord, and somewhere you are going to intersect. 

Sometimes people who don’t want to get involved with the Corporate politics of the music industry bounce their way directly out to the non corporate industry path.  The trail they take isn’t taken because of money issues or opportunity issues or personality disagreements, it is taken because they just don’t like corporations and the idea of the system skimming from the artist.  That is a valid point of view, as far as it goes.  It is like a note in a larger sound.

Corporations in music do more than just publish music and skim profits.  There really is a whole industry of support structures and opportunity creation that exists within the various Corporate structures of the media and entertainment Corporations.  Many of the Corporate people don’t know much about music at all.  They know accounting and insurance and publicity, not music.  The development departments are structured to ensure that they develop artists who can produce product that sells consistently.  That is “one note” – make money is the goal.

The real problem in the way the music industry development professionals present themselves these days is twofold.  First, the development is aimed at the youth market – because it is assumed that once you’ve passed high school, you’ll never want to learn music well enough to publish.  Second, and this is the bigger issue, EVERYTHING the corporations support seems to turn out to be “pay to play”.  Pay to play is a huckster method of getting money up front for a service that might or might not be completed.

I know from personal experience that the music industry is almost exclusively a “closed shop” operation.  There are a few “open mic” nights and “send us your tape” indies, but when it comes down to developing the interest in the foundations of music – teaching the fundamentals that run through all the levels of professional music from Classical to genre – the one road in, if you can make it further on up the road, is a pay to play road.  This is not shocking when you think about the way that education has been treated in America.  Education has been made increasingly expensive even in the public sphere, despite the widespread claim that “knowledge is power” and “education is the road to knowledge”. 

When I was very young, I had two sources of music education that stuck.  While I could also count the two classes a week in Elementary school, and they really should count, I actually group that class with the “public” education I received from my home city’s Symphony Orchestra.  That part of my education was brief – if I slept hard, I’d probably forget that I received it; somehow, I remember.  I remember the place where the education was given, and I remember that I was dropped from the classes because I was too young to know that I was supposed to keep up by making classical music my only real goal in life.  It would have meant practicing two or three hours a day when I was not yet 10 years old.  The instruction was designed to tell me what it took, what was in it, and then to leave it to me to figure out how to implement it.

The other source was a girl from up the block who used to “babysit” while my parents went to some social event.  She taught me everything there was to know about learning chords and scales, and she tried to teach me “House of the Rising Sun” which was a hit rock song at the time.  She was probably in high school at the time, and I was still in Elementary school.  Whatever she told me on Saturday night, I’d generally forgotten it by Sunday morning.  Still, there was a piece of what she told me that remained dormant inside my mind, in my memory. 

It wasn’t until I really made the commitment to music as my whole heart venture many years later that I started to look for schooling on music theory and music practice.  When I found a local music school in Denver – Swallow Hill Music Association – that took music learning by adults seriously, and made it somewhat affordable to me at the time, it was a totally new experience for me: Learning as an adult.  I had spent years working “around” musicians in Los Angeles, asking them questions and generally being an almost pest in my curiosity about what they were doing, and “what is the music business”, but I had never found a place like the Musician’s Institute – even though some of these people were part of the Musician’s Institute Programming, according to what I later heard.  I guess they just wanted to get away ….

From the beginning of my “music relationships” in Los Angeles, I had started focusing on the areas of development that might fit my skills.  I didn’t play an instrument well enough at the time to even consider the “talent” side of the equation; I was thinking about production, and how to tie what I was learning and studying at the time, which stretched from Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism, which I basically remember, to teaching and learning theory, which is mostly a bundled blur.  It took me fifteen years to make the whole connection – from philosophy to “kyo” [sound or “teachings of the Buddha”].  When I finally did make the connection between what I was seeking while buzzing around those professional musicians in the 1980’s and the “whole heart commitment” to music as a career, I realized that I needed to play an instrument well to demonstrate what it was that I was talking about, if I was talking in a “teaching mode” as a Producer or an artist.  For the next decade, I tried to practice as much as possible – two, three, four hours a day.  I went through the peaks and valleys, forgetting just about everything, then remembering what had driven me forward in my learning.  Perhaps I wasn’t organized – I was not in a school – or perhaps I just needed to pound the information into my brain.  It was the opening of the “caged method” that came and went – the closer I stayed to understanding by practice in the C-A-G-E-D system of chords and scales, the more my playing reflected what I wanted it to project.  That chord and scale system is “Classical music”.

As I’ve searched for a way to make a career in the music business, I’ve increasingly found that there are few inroads to employment that don’t involve pay to play.  Even the companies that offer “introductory programs” start making demands about qualifications for employment that involve having spent money, an education, or certification before being considered.  Companies that should be developing from within aren’t – a lesson I learned this past year which opened my eyes to how closed the shop is.  Everywhere I look, you must pay!  Want to network to write or pitch songs?  Pay to join an Association – and maybe that could happen ….

Problem with all the pay to play angles?  When you’re not making money, and you’re doing jobs to get to the next level of learning on your own, eventually, you’re so far marginalized in terms of employment [“the note”] that you can’t reach the chord [“the Corporations” & the industry].  Development is a growth  industry in the music business, if you can get the job.

Perhaps when the shop is closed is the time to start looking for market share …, despite the laughter [and silence] on Music Row. 

Talking to the right person …

I had a moment of clarity, and then it was gone again, into the ether where I apparently keep it or where clarity is kept. For a moment, I knew why I wanted to teach music, with a view toward education and spiritual awakening, directed toward building a functioning production system with active participants in what would be a business. I knew how I could explain it, and then the doubts arose again. There is too much information, and people’s patience demands the quick answer when the quick answer is not available. I have been studying many quick answers, and it is the sum of those answers which add up into the starting place of what I am trying to create.

There is an age group that needs to start. I have studied how to start, and how to approach teaching how to start. The younger students must start at the beginning because they do not have the residual knowledge base to construct from within the frame with missing pieces between. It is called building from a foundation, and all good architecture starts that way. I know how to start from the foundation, but how deeply into the construction must we and/or should we go? There is a solid starting point in just getting to know how to play the instruments, without going into all of the “tricks” and secrets that will come out in time about the instruments.

I envisioned finding the spot where the instruments “cross over”, where the playing starts to be both the playing and something more. I am a storyteller from the ground, from the Earth, but I am also a spiritual being, and I work in the spiritual realm as well. I work in film as a film director, I work in music as a sound director, and I work in education as an educator. The music is the learning instrument. Without the instruments, the film is an image in an imaginary space, as are all of my “movies” so far, as none are published and I have not been to film school, although I have studied. I am not a cinematographer, and I am technically not an engineer, but I have studied sound, and I know how to lead an engineer to the right questions, and I know how to teach somebody to think about the right questions if they are a sound engineer. I have learned how to teach, but I have not really taught, because teaching is learning, and the opportunity to teach should only be accepted when it is at a stage where learning is part of the teaching. These are simultaneous cause and effect relationships.

I love the technology we have now, that allows us to isolate objects, even objects in sound waves, so that we can follow how the path of the cause enters into the field as an effect. I love the idea of setting up a production company that is responsive, that can help people grow to understand their personal mission in life, and to better see cause and effect as they fit into a whole picture. I love that opportunity could come, if I could just pull the whole concept out of the ether, when I was talking to the right person ….

The Last Dollar Spent

People think that the rhythm of life doesn’t include the music, if they think about that at all. One of the things that I thought about, and tested against the times with my ears listening to hear the underlying language of the music, was if there was a pattern to the sound of the music that was considered “hit music”. The notes of a melody are clearly designed to be expressive of the voice and voicing of the singer, but the music that plays behind a vocal, or the music itself if it is a symphony, are played in language as well. Sometimes that language is specific; sometimes that language is musical, built from the accompaniment and the “rules” that go with accompaniment. There are the “theory rules”, which aren’t really rules at all, more like guidelines which help musicians find the muse that was in the writer or to become the muse when they are writing a “response” to a call. When your ear can hear the language, it can start to explore the music, and the intention of the writers. Pieces that are more musical have a hypnotic effect, being tied to a rhythm, but as anyone who has the heard the exploration of rhythm which is in the Japanese Taiko drum or the African chant knows, the timing of a beat is also or can also be a language, so accompaniment of a rhythm can be a language hidden in the music.

The question I started to ask myself is “when do we start speaking English”? I ask this because in some cases I can hear it in the music, but in some cases I don’t hear any language at all. I began asking this question a very long time ago. It was part of hearing symphony also; what about composers who never spoke the language of the people for whom their work is being played? Is the music translated by the score or by the feeling of the translation, or by translation?

A few summers back I went to hear Herbie Hancock & Lang Lang play with the Los Angeles Symphony and I heard a classical piece which I “translated” as being about a certain story – I then found out what conditions that the symphony had been written under. I might have been right about what the composer was “saying”, I had the right story, but it was a story based upon instrumentation, not language, it was based upon the use of instruments in a particular fashion to express a certain emotion and a certain movement of the social culture upon which the piece was a commentary. That was for me a symphony performance that was realized. Even sitting high up in the Hollywood Bowl, I could feel the transcendental emotion of the music as a “hurricane”, which is the emotional goal for most composers.

My question about language came from a disconnection in other cases because the interior language of the music is not in a language that I can hear – and so emotionally, I have difficulty attaching to “that emotion”. So I always wonder, “when are we going to talk in [“ “]?”  The facility to learn to talk in music is ‘someplace in time’, and too often encased in corporate money expectations that limit reaching out.  For years I have heard the same silence about the question, “can we talk about music”? 

I came to believe that part of the equation about language in music is a matter of the education and desire of the musicians. For me, it is a great accomplishment to know how to write transcendental music in your native language, but there comes a time when that is “easy”. When it is easy to play and write with a voice, it is time to study with a voice. That voice is not just the language of the music, both the music language, but also the culture language. We learn to communicate across culture with music through the rhythms and the spoken language voice which we add into the music.

I had a teacher/friend who used to say that when he was travelling he was always silently proud of himself when he was asked if he was from a certain place – a place he might have recently been, where he knew and spoke the native language – and was asked if he was from [“x”] because he had their accent in his attempts to speak locally, even though English was his native language, and the other languages were not. His was an example of someone who knew how to dive into the culture without falling away from his own personality. That he generally looked like Einstein didn’t hurt ….

What is disappointing me more than any temporary state of affairs I might find myself in today, is that while reaching out to find out if I simply missed the educational opportunity or if it was not there, I have seen how wonderfully value creating expanding the reach of music can be, but it’s so sad, because I wonder if it was the last dollar was spent ….

Writing out the whole thing ….

Lately I’ve had some time to really delve deeply into the writing out of the various parts of the Production & Education system that I’ve been building, mostly in my head or as a response to experiences.  I’ve been through almost every level of the crucifixion for the idea that local spirits can come up with  -- I’ve dealt with being accused of not being a musician, of not being a musician with enough interest in certain kinds of music, of not being prepared for the responsibilities of a lifetime commitment, of being “tone-deaf”, of being stupid, of many things, obviously.  What I haven’t had was an opportunity to speak with people who can fix what they think are the problems with my being a “music producer”.

One of the educational lessons I learned when I was teaching myself through reading and interactive media is that there are three levels of direct learning:

1. Present – teacher and learner are physically “together” in a learning session.
2. “Presented” – this might be a live interaction or it might be a delayed prescience, like a video with internet or written, or even telephone follow up. 
3. Written – this is one way communication, where the idea of the teacher is still presented, but there is no way to interact, other than through trial and error of application of what is written. 

Obviously, when you can ask your teacher anything, and get a full response, the environment is conducive to learning.  When there are physical barriers, but there is still interaction, the environment can make corrections for misinterpretations.  When reading material produced by someone else, there is always room for error in how it is interpreted.  I think of these stages as “I’m here”; “I’m going, but I’m still here” [why do I think of Shirley MacClaine when I here that phrase “I’m still here”?]; & “I’m already gone” (but make of it what you will [hope I hear of, and enjoy the interpretations]) . 

Unfortunately, the exercise in writing out the “angles of my production company” is not being done in concert with a mentor, so far anyway.  I know that the ideas that I’ve generated are solid because they are built from the foundations of scholarship and experiences gathered by me from those who have written or “presented” their ideas about what music is, what music production is, how to approach it as an art and as a business, but there are levels of Production which are not so easy to describe and organize in writing.  Some of the problem with “not so easy” is probably erased as soon as the material lands not in the social wasteland of those who are not in a communion relationship, but some of it comes from not being in the field with contemporaries and contemporary teachers who want to share and mold information for the betterment of the craft and the art.  I’ve been writing from the same base perspective on production, and my approach to producing particular music projects, for well over ten years, since I started realizing that I knew enough to trust that my perspective was grounded in the fifteen years of observation of music and art that came before that in the workplace and in educational and corporate environments.  What I mean is that I’ve had to learn from “not music” as much as from music, and the basics of the music production itself haven’t changed much since I became focused on music theory and applying it to the business of music production.  Explaining music theory in “corporate terms” is however a task that can seem never-ending.

Mentors?  Where do they come from, and how do you find one who can actually help you in your musical search?  That question came up in 1997, then it was in a religious and in a business context, but I was already well on the way to understanding what it was specifically I wanted to “teach” in music.  Having been escorted through the maze of the golf industry teaching field, I realized that in the music business, there was probably something similar – where individuals are whisked off to an Elementary School music teaching job, but only if they are “certified”.  There is of course the “way up” through the players school – produce your own work until somebody else asks you to produce for them.  That requires no educational training at all, and is experiential.  The “music people” I was involved with in Los Angeles in the 1980’s probably qualify on this path – they were working  musicians, perhaps well known, perhaps not even regionally known, who were seeking to improve their ability to make a living from music enterprise.  It’s easier to make a living in music if you can get a “gig” anytime you want one, and even better if you know that the venue will make money on the “event”.  And then there are the people who came to music because the Corporation sent them there, and they may or may not know anything about mentoring, or about the musical arts for that matter, but they have their position and they do their best to keep it.  Nobody has the time to take on the outside world ….

When I watched professional tour golfers, I was following them to learn how to see the golf swing.  I made it to the top of the Golf field’s “professional teacher club”, but I was unqualified as a direct teacher because I’d never taught someone else before.  Even the few lessons I’d given were admittedly awful, from my perspective anyway, because I didn’t know how to organize the material so that somebody else understood it, and could use it in a way that might help them to enjoy the venture. 

When I listen to music, I am listening for the lessons also.  Soon after I knew I had to make the switch from “education” – golf as “player” – to music, I realized that in order to really express music “theory” you need to at least have a passing ability to demonstrate the concept on some form of instrumentation.  I began working on guitar in order to improve my bass playing … .  The whole exploration of “guitar application of music theory” was really a venture into the theory of how to “teach” music production.  It isn’t easy to teach production with instrumentation, unless you are the composer, because the artists often are temperamental about what they have created or are trying to create.  There are producer arrangements where the Producer is strictly an  “engineer in charge”, and there are also those situations where the Producer is someone who is like a motion picture film producer to the musicians’ Director.  So having a system of production, and getting it to “paper” is not an easy undertaking.  It is a delicate process because the misinterpretation sends the meaning of the point being written about off course, in a great percentage of cases.  There are so many details.

Even as I started this month re-writing “all the points to here”, I soon realized that what I have is a monster production process.  Perhaps, that is what is necessary to produce “world class music”.  Perhaps that is why I seem to nearly always find the mentor [and employment] hopper empty – pursuit is consumptive.  And just maybe, it is why I hear the sound of the Eagles singing ALREADY GONE while I wonder if hell has frozen over ….

A Classical Note Introduction–“How We Met”

I can remember the image of the classical musicians laughing at me; they were laughing for many reasons. Foremost, they laughed out of fear, fear for me and fear of me. They knew what they had been through to achieve their level of success. They knew all the tricks that they learned by making mistakes. They knew I was likely to make all those mistakes too, if I stayed in pursuit of the dream, the idea, and they drew their laughter out of the many emotions that their frustrations had drawn out of them through the years. They could remember the emotions; it was one of the keys to playing well, knowing what you were supposed to feel when you were playing a piece, and putting all of that feeling into the instrument and making the instrument sound the emanation. They laughed because it is next to impossible to learn how to play like that; to play like that without a mentor is a phenomenon that scares them, because it means more frustration, born of something not obvious or something obvious that maybe they hadn’t thought about or felt. They wanted to be prepared to play, but that is no easy task.

When I told them I was going to compose a symphony, they laughed even harder; it was like a hard rain of a hurricane becoming the band filled wit the most saturation, the saturation that rises from below the ground and goes to the highest storm cloud of the storm.  People don’t write symphonies – they progress through music circles and they wind up with one already written that they piece together out of works they already know.  They looked at me, struggling to remember which key I was in, which note my finger was on, unable to read music at speed, nearly incapable of keeping time on a score sheet, and their laughter, well, even I could understand their voice.

That, was thirty years ago.  Some days these days, I can remember the key, and I can play well enough to demonstrate and hear the idea; but I am still riding against the wind.  I am still riding against the opposition which says “Symphonies are for time; make contemporary music first”.  But maybe that’s all wrong.  Maybe wanting to be a writer, wanting to build a system to create inroads to Education and motivation and music and arts and sciences and broadcasting and the religion of scriptures, all of it reaching out toward enlightenment, toward God is THE SYMPHONY, the sound of the place where we are, and that is the sound which reaches out to time.

I still wondered, would they bother to hear?  Would they bother to notice that my applications say NEED EMPLOYMENT not WANT employment, although want is “in there too”.  I want to work, but they’re not letting me.  I work on my own, I study, I practice, I learn, but the cost is taking my life now, not in some distant future.  The cost has me practicing where I compete with the echo of the airplane that just took off with its four hundred dollar seats, and my five cent bank account.  I don’t have a room where I can hear the notes, the reach of the emotion, the feel changing in response to hitting it wrong, or staying the same when it is right.  I am likely to get pushed around “just one more time” like a junkie on a last ride, an winter is here, although it is nearly 90 degrees outside today, winter is here, because the cold will penetrate my “practice room”, but I will not stop playing until the instrument is taken too, and the cold is snow and the freezing is penetrating the practice room of the downtown parking lot where I am managing to get nearly an hour, maybe two a day instead of the three or four or more [on the subject] that it takes to catch the wind.  I am nearly all caught up with the wind, but the wind does not seem to penetrate the laughter ….