In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless. -Aleister Crowley

A quote from one of the most famous or should I say infamous magicians of all time is so true of music as it is of magic or as Mr Crowley would have said magick.

Any art form from dance and poetry to music and sculpture is about expression of you the artist and one would use the tools of the trade – your talents and virtues as the building blocks to express this however without willpower you have no way of dealing with the blows that land on you from people who critique you and who are just downright jealous of you.

You need to develop a thick skin to deal with this and that is something that most artists do not have and it needs to be acquired.

A little bit like the skin on the ends of your fingers that start being very painful and then they toughen up and then one never feels that level of discomfort again.

 

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

Right under your nose.

Sometimes we look for something and it is hiding in plain sight, right under our noses but because we do not expect the answer to be that easy we miss it.
Many of the answers in my own life I have found to be like this, something that I ‘stepped over’ in the course of every day and it often took something to change my paradigm to make me notice.
I was thinking about this with regard to music, some musicians get this instinctively and they know that the answers to their musical questions are already with them, they just need to ‘see’ them. Maybe the use of different ways of thinking through use of drugs or just dropping out help them to find what is right there.
I have explored the way that music changes consciousness and the way that consciousness changes music and some of the answers are so simple that you are amazed that they were staring you in the face all of the time.
This situation does not just apply to music, for an example I worked for a while in a bank as a cashier and balancing a till often led to a till difference where the figures did not tally. Once you had looked a few times then you would not see your mistake but someone else could spot it straight away. It was almost that you were hypnotised to what you could not see because you did not see it before.
So look with new eyes into things as if you did not know yourself…………..

Vic


www.bluescampuk.co.uk


Let us show you how to rock............

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors. Jim Morrison

The silence in between the place of naturalness these are powerful places; the between yes and no what Edward De Bono calls Po.
The Taoists call it ‘suspending your disbelief’ this is a creative place that things start from almost a trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost or Sun, Moon and Earth or Above Below and Middle Earth all of these trinities are hinting at the same thing.
The Doors were one of the most creative bands of the period and they were greatly influenced by one of the great British writers Aldous Huxley taking their name from his work the Doors of Perception.
Morrison certainly put himself ‘in between’ but we can do this just by thinking ‘outside’ even dreaming something different will do it.
Try this today let go of what you think is possible and what you think impossible and make it plausible and then act towards it.
Vic


www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Ghandi

What a great motto for those who teach from one of the great people of the 20^th century.

Learning is such an important thing that is why it is not done in schools. Learning which is free and unfettered is the thing that brings down governments and creates freedom for ordinary people that is why Ghandi was shot.

I am not suggesting that we bring down the government but I am suggesting that the type of learning that people can do through learning an instrument is very different than the type of learning that happens in schools and this is the opening for you as a musician.

Also good learning is fun and effortless it is what the human mind does best, but when you are being forced to acquire information that is what is difficult because there is no joy in it.

Vic

  www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

Examination Reportage

It is always good fun jamming with people and every now and again I get chance to play with people that as a boy I listened to and admired.
Yesterday I was jamming with Chas Hodges and was able to sit and interview him for the Bluescampuk website. Chas has been down to us for the last three years and every year is an event because he brings something special to the time that he is there.
What I like about Chaz is his ability to just get stuck in and play and that is so refreshing, no pretence just play and have some fun which is something I cannot say about some of the things that I have to do for music and music teaching!
After a day of enjoyable playing I come back to check my emails to see that I have to correct a number of reports that I wrote for the last batch of examinations, however within the errors were some that included words deemed to be subjective like ‘good’ where I needed to use the words ‘secure’ or ‘effective’ I am not sure about this but where I have written ‘good’ it was because I was fed up with ‘secure’ and I think those things are also subjective because it is still my opinion.
I have done less and less examining over the years and when I do some I then realise why I generally do not bother agreeing to do them in the first place. In my mind candidates are only taking guitar exams as a target for their practise nothing more; really for a musician it is about going out and playing because walking out on stage saying ‘hey look at how clever I am’ and waving a certificate, whether that is for grade one or for a licentiate diploma will illicit the response once shouted at Frank Zappa of ‘shut up and play your guitar’.
Chaz does not have a single certificate for his playing but he does have an allotment.

Vic

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