A person suffers if they are constantly being forced into a statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling – Robert Bly

The road of feeling is something that is difficult to show someone who is learning to play an instrument. It can be alluded to, hinted at, demonstrated but not given as a defined map reference for someone to find. The road is unique to everyone; the elements required are the same for all but ordnance reference will be different, because we all have differing maps.

The problem with something that lies in the unconscious  world of feeling,  emotion and imagination is that being hard to teach we reach for the things that are easy, statistical, measureable and mark able and that is sadly not helping people grow either musically or emotionally.

The statistical world helps only the accountants and leads to people to suffering emotionally. Imagine that you are told by a doctor that you have a 50% chance of survival from a prognosis, that is cold and unemotional and you might say good that the facts are delivered in this way but wait until you are in that position then you will feel that icy touch of statistics from the learned professionals and experts in their field. We are not Vulcans and Mr Spock may have been able to deal with that statement but humans do not deal well with this because it is devoid of feeling. In Garner Thompson’s excellent book ‘Magic in Practice’ which is about the use of language in health care the importance of choice of words that engages the patient in their healing is very important but is sadly lacking today. The old idea of ‘bedside manor’ has been lost in the pursuit of targets and the magic bullet of Big Pharma. The evidence is that in a world where we are being told that things are better than ever, there are increased rates of mental illness and not just in the elderly but increasingly in the young. The word disease shows us in its epistemology exactly what we experience, dis- ease.

This is just part of the picture it is also true of arts and music, sound devoid of feeling is just sound not music at all however it has been processed through Pro Tools. So in playing or teaching we need to connect to the feeling that is the music, make the sounds connect to your emotions let it mean something and allow the music to set you free.

 

Vic

 

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Golden Rule- Those who have the gold make the rules.

 This is a rule that applies to music as much as it does for politics and business.
For a moment cast all of one’s ideas of music to one side and think back to a past that had no Christian Church and no written notation of music, but had the story tellers and music makers, some of whom roamed and others who held sacred positions within the social group such as a village.
Music might have been learnt as sacred songs that expressed something ceremonial within the time of year and the society that it was set. This music may have been learnt from others who held the songs or direct from the source itself as in the South American shamans who would have learn ‘from the plant’ the sacred song.
With the advent of Christianity this all changed and over the years, music become more and more formalised with the idea of improvisation banned in preference of something that had been censored by the church; hence writing music and replaying the music of the masters note for note.
This in turn becomes the bench mark of being a real musician; that you can read and that you can play as a regurgitation of the music written thus taking away a musician’s ability to express their creativity.
We know this is the case because it has been documented again and again, most recently with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia (the latter not even being regarded as ‘citizens’ of the country that was originally theirs). The music and the instruments of the indigenous people were ridiculed or banned from use and the Western instruments brought in to replace them.
In a short period of time something that is instigated as a change in the way that music is produced or performed becomes the norm in a society where we forget the past so easily.
A light in the tunnel is the possibility of crowd funding music and arts projects through the likes of Kickstarter and Pledge. May this be the way of change to something more rooted in human experience, long forgotten in a distant past but like all true music is still echoing in the deepest recesses of our consciousness.
Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk