Lightly does it.

There is a lot of talk about bees and the falling numbers of butterflies and general degradation of wild life and many of us wring our hands and say that we support conservation BUT we do nothing about it.
What is needed, and this is not just my opinion, is that people should do nothing! Just leave their gardens uncut and let the wild flowers take over and then the flowers needed for the insect life would return and the biodiversity would rebalance. HOWEVER we would incur the wrath of …. the neighbours.
Where I live, the profusion of wild flowers if left is mind boggling but the people who live in the villages are often fighting a war with the weeds and the insects that although critical to the eco system are not the ones liked by the villagers. Weeds, gnats, wasps, snakes, flies and mice are essential food for the birds bats and other hunters however if they poison everything in sight then we are going to destroy what we want; such is human stupidity.
We are now aware that saving one species requires the saving of many others and in the final analysis if we lose the lower layers of the food chain the top layers will collapse, hello that is us!
For me, my interests in music come from a deeper interest in life in general it is where I get my inspiration and this is what I encourage others to do; to find theirs. Apart from the Bluescampuk courses where people are taught the tricks of the trade so that they can play and write songs I also do more abstract courses in woodlands where we go back to older forms of music and its inspiration; that of nature both in the natural word and the esoteric because for our ancestors nature was divine. For them the trees and plants were sentient beings and along with the animal spirits they could be communicated with and used as allies, and for this they would use music.
This sounds to the modern ear rather crazy but the basic plot of altered realities are the biggest sellers in movie and song so there is still a desire for that way of thinking even if it is just a creative dream.
Many musicians and artists become passionate about conservation but I am suggesting that we can go better than that we can be revisionists’ getting back some of what we have lost but to do this we need to change our minds. I think that we are doing this in many ways and if you look back over the past 100 years many things have got better. I am not suggesting that we need to go back to mud huts but we need to use our humanness and our technology to fit back into nature because there really is no way we can carry on like this and change when it comes will be very fast. We have already seen this with regard to the collapse of the banking sector, it was not a slow thing it was almost overnight.
Again I am giving the general attitude a kicking as I often do, normally it is education but I would also say that we have a mind-set that the experts of got it under control. Well they had experts organising the banks, we have experts in the government and experts in the health sector so I think I will leave with two quotes, one from a sage and one from an Emperor.
Napoleon first; someone was put up for promotion to Marshall because he was such an expert in tactics and leadership. Napoleon was unimpressed by how much of an expert this gentleman was, what he wanted to know was ‘Is he lucky’. So much for logic!
The Taoist sage Lao Tzu said that people should be governed as you would cook a small fish; lightly. This may be true for gardening as well.
Vic
 
 
  www.bluescampuk.co.uk  learn to play ...........

One word of caution

‘My one word of caution is that a cow chewing contentedly in a field, once you have looked over the wall and seen what is out there, chewing the same old grass never seems quite so satisfying again.’ – Nigel Twinn

At one of the schools in which I teach they have introduced a scheme through the pupil premium where the pupils can have music lessons to develop their self-esteem. I am teaching either guitar or singing and there is also a drum teacher.

This seems to be an enlightened idea and I know that if they are able to acquire a skill that means they achieve something, maybe performing or passing a grade they will have something different and positive in their school lives which quite honestly they are not getting at the moment.

Over the years that I have taught I have often heard from past pupils that music has been something very special and it has really changed the way they view the world. For some they realised that the teachers at school who told them that they were spending too long on music and should be working on their science had got it wrong. In one case this was viewed from the stage of the Hollywood bowl and he reflected that the best thing he ever did was to stop doing science.

I have also a number of pupils who would say that music has become a religion or certainly a spiritual experience which informs them about life on a deep level. I spend a lot of time listening to great musicians and I would say that this is something that figures significantly for many deepening their experience and adding something that ordinary life does not give them

So maybe they need to heed the warning that music will change one’s life in ways that you cannot see in this moment making you realise that you are special so special that you are a musician.

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

check it out!

 

 

 

 

 

Play like you don’t know. - Miles Davis

This is a story that Santana tells about Miles talking with Eric Clapton, for me it gives us an insight into the workings of the mind of a genius. We have gone so far down the road of the clever clogs where we anal-ise the hell out of everything that we end up with a sterile piece of sound. There is a joke about the similarity between analysing a joke and dissecting a frog to see how it works; the result, you end up with a dead frog.

Miles came to music from a line that said it is not the technique or the knowledge that mattered it is the feeling, as he would of said playing ‘from the heart not the head’. But is that not true of everything, education, medicine, relationships, politics? We have become too clever by half, lots of things can be a lot simpler and far more effective and this is so true for the art of music making.

So sit down and listen to some Muddy Waters and feel what is going on because it sure damn well isn’t in the number of notes or the complexity of the scales and chords.

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

Be lazy like a fox’. Linus Torvalds

This is similar in many ways to ‘Do not reinvent the wheel’ the solutions are out there and some have been used over and over again throughout history so look for the answer that is staring you in the face. Sometimes this answer is to be found in someone that you know you just need to ask around.

I have found that many people that I teach have skills that I need, whether that is fixing a computer, sorting out software problems, advice on building websites, finding somewhere to live, advice on gardening or fixing the car, but in all of these cases I would not have known unless I asked and also suggested swapped lessons for their time and knowledge.

I have got the point that I am quite lazy and I always look for the simple ways to deal with problems which are often cheaper, this has led me to looking into recycling and what is now termed upcycling. This is something that can be used for electric guitars, taking knackered instruments and rebuilding them incorporating parts of other guitars or ‘junk’ like old vinyl LPs for scratch plates, or making plectrums from old credit cards.

We need to consider that people in the past were as clever and in many ways cleverer than we are today, some experiments suggest that the Victorians had higher IQ’s than we do so look back to see the solutions that previous generations adopted for solutions as their main resource was ideas.   

Vic