Can you teach me to swim? Because, I am drowning……….

I am interested in the subtext of news stories and even the choice of which news story finds its way onto the TV, radio and now social media there are distinct patterns of what is acceptable, what is to be ridiculed and what is to be ignored. There is a strict code to what is deemed acceptable and not accept regarding other regimes and other forms of thinking. At the moment science is the new religion and seems not to be able to do any wrong even though many of the statements made by the media scientists are more a form of scientism than science.

One of the things I find interesting as I get older is that over time you notice a pattern of things that are so-called disproved or unscientific but seem to be very relevant as time goes on in some cases they even get approved what seems to go missing is the acceptance that the conventional rational aspect and it’s black swan event goes unchallenged.

As an example of this and I can quote many, is that of the health benefits of butter and margarine. For years we have been told margarine was better than butter we were barraged through the media about various margarine products that had health giving benefits by scientific research, all of this of course has been proven not to be true and the research was skewed somehow. People however have known for years that there was nothing wrong with butter or fats because if there was then the Inuit who eat large quantities of fish fat and whale blubber would not be as fit as were are the same goes for the French who cooked everything in butter and lard.

Now I see the same pompous attitude permeating other aspects of media reporting into the abstract and grey areas of the mind. Sometimes they can be health benefits from something that on the surface does not seem to work or certainly not in the lab but in the real world creates real change, one of those things may be homeopathy I have certainly seen some beneficial effects of homeopathy including the treatment of horses which were very successful.

I like to use the NLP phrase epithet ‘it’s not a case of whether it is true but more a case of if it works’ sometimes simply changing a link in the chain can make real progress and again we see this very clearly in the world of music that changing a few words can transform a lyric, just changing a few notes can transform melody even changing the way we look can transform somebody’s ability onstage to make an impact. When we deal with the arts ambiguity and abstractness can transform an idea into something very powerful.

Another observation that I would like to make is that often these non-scientific abstract forms of thinking coming into play far too late to have a real effect and then in turn seems to prove themselves inefficient because it is too late in the day, like learning to swim while you are drowning. Such as alternative treatments being used for cancer patients when it is the last resort. Even though there are instances of cures for supposedly incurable conditions, like somebody who has serious stress condition suddenly deciding that they needed to learn how to meditate. Yes meditation will work but it is better if you learn to meditate before you have the stress condition and then of course you would never know how effective meditation is because you might never get the condition.

So much better to learn to swim before you are drowning, much better to think about your health before your unhealthy.

Explore that way of thinking with regard to music, make sure that you are using concepts that develop your ability to be a musician beyond the technicalities before you need those skills; make those skills infuse your technical abilities.

Vic

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Its a mystery

Our willingness to wonder is where mystery goes for shelter from the steady attack on it from our demand for information, clarity and certainty……………. Resolving mystery is like dissecting someone you love to find out why they are so loved.     Stephen Jenkinson

If we go back to the period pre-enlightenment we will see that was consideration given for the idea of revelation with information can be gathered without any logical timeline that made a connection between the outcome and the thought process.

In other words there was room for mystery and that is sadly lacking amongst us with regard to education but I think is absolutely crucial when it comes to the artistic process that the answers can suddenly appear out of nowhere.

The answers come from the unconscious and they may be solutions to things that we have seen before but have forgotten as time has gone by. To encourage pupils to find the answers to musical puzzles that are presented within song writing and improvisation I try to rely on the ability to hear and feel the music and not to think about what the fingers are doing or what our intellect tells us.

The problem with this approach is it is difficult to formulate a lesson plan with such an abstract concept. It is a little bit like putting a figure for goodwill on the balance sheet it is all very much a case of guesstimate.

The other problem that we have in the English speaking areas of the world is that the language does not really accommodate the idea of mystery very well. A language such as Spanish or Arabic is much more poetic in the way that it approaches concepts such as this and this is evident by the quality of the poetry found in those languages that are deep and mystical such as the work of Rumi, Kabir, Neruda and Garcia Marquez.

So the ability to be in wonder of what happens in music allowing if you will the Muses to take control maybe an idea. Let things flow and do not micromanage the artistic process. Leave room for things to happen however chaotic that may feel to you.

Vic

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Right, it is time to write, right?

When I was at school I spent a lot of time practising my handwriting, there were lots of competitions and prizes for those who had the best hand. Subsequently I have quite an artistic script and so have many other people of my age. On the other hand, literally, young people that I have been teaching over the last twenty to thirty years do not have such developed handwriting, many of them have rather small and childish looking writing in my opinion and yet they may be in their early thirties.

I became interested in graphology when I was in my teens because my art teacher at the time was really good at being able to read a person’s characteristics from their handwriting and I became interested in the skill. This was and is a rather uncannily accurate way of determining a personality type so much so that graphologists were and are often employed by the police while trying to build a profile. The question that I would like to pose here is what does this say about the psychological make up of people today with such incredibly childish handwriting?

Now before we dismiss this as a crazy idea there is another strain to this that being, how much does the educational system affect personal development of one’s character? The particular aspect that I would like to focus on is one’s ability to be independent and really think for oneself in a sort of ‘the buck stops here’ kind of way and the ability to make a decision without reference to an expert or just the strong belief that you are expert enough to decide on a course of action.

I am not suggesting that we do not refer to other people and their knowledge, what I am suggesting is that we have more knowledge and more control of our lives than society makes us believe we have. In fact the whole of the education system is based on the premise that you know nothing and someone else in this case the teacher is the expert. The fact that the child by the time of arriving at school has learnt to speak a language fluently and to recognise words and possibly write their own name, be able to control their physical actions and to be able to read social situations expertly (which is something that many parents do not believe their children can do), and yet we still consider them to be in need of an expert guidance in learning as if they know nothing.

Never again will a child be so expert at learning another language, not because of some physical change but because they will be learning a language in the classroom. If that child was to move to another country within six months or so they would be fluent in the new language. My father was a good example of this, leaving school at fifteen and then joining the army. By the end of the war he could speak fluent Arabic and Swahili and was passible in Italian and German. 

We need to engender a form of self-reliance in ourselves and in people that we teach otherwise how will they ever learn to believe in their own artistic and musical abilities? These abilities are not technical which of course are the primary and in some cases sole focus of music education, what really makes a musician stand out is their ability to communicate, which is artistic.

Children have an ability to communicate which has nothing to do with school and in my experience of teaching adults is that they seem to have lost that ability to communicate through music which is basically the same innate ability as language

So have faith you are your own star or at least star dust and you need to say what you have to say ….

Vic

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Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

 

I like a paradox as they contain truth. Every light casts a shadow and we do not care too much for the darkness of things but often the darkness gives us the true meaning of its essence. How true this is with music. How many great songs are written by people who are not particularly great on the instruments that they play? In fact for many being great at playing is a draw back as a writer with only a few exceptions such as Hendrix and Clapton.  

Success is often like that, when you give up measuring yourself by your markers of success it flows more freely. This is something sighted by entrepreneurs that money becomes a marker not the goal often the goal will be something less obvious like the challenge of making something happen.

Better to fix the mind on things that success would afford you instead of the success itself, so for the pupil and the teacher do not focus on the grade but what the grade will enable you to do. Playing in a band that performs a particular style of music requiring that level of knowledge is a better motivator than the examination day and the piece of paper at the end of it.

In business instead of focusing on the money look at what it would do for you and focus on that. The mind seems to have a way of flagging up possibilities of acquiring the ways and means of achieving that possibility. I often use the story of somebody buying a new car, once they have made the decision on which model and which colour that they are going to buy one starts to see that colour and that model car everywhere. Now that is a good example of how alert we become to the possibilities of acquiring that which we desire. There are some theories that take this idea and apply it to belief systems that once we have a belief system the unconscious will find evidence of the truth of that belief in the world around us. Now if we take this as a fact for the time being it means that the things that appear to be wholly true maybe just a fabrication of how we think and by exploring the shadow side of that or the opposite side of that we get a much rounded picture that may be ignored by the unconscious searching out the things that satisfy our belief systems.

So back to the happiness: by searching out the result of happiness, being with friends having connections with family the feeling of support and assistance there is much to point these as being where happiness can be found.

So what about making music having an effect on people? Songs that allude to the results that an emotion will give you will then in turn in its shadow give the listener the emotion that you are attempting to engender in the listener.

Best way to try this out is to work on yourself.  Listen to some music that makes you feel in a particular way and notice carefully the things that appear to trigger that response. What are the lyrics doing? What is the feel of the piece of music? Does it make you think of anything?

So success with music is giving success to others ………………………

Vic

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Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him? Chuang Tzu

 What is in a word, a lyric, a poem?

We are bombarded by words, phrases and catchy soundbites wherever we go, it is totally relentless, and for us to escape somewhere devoid of words is now very difficult. However for our ancestors solitude was easy to find and therefore words were recognised as having far more power than they do today. Because of the abundance words they seem to have been devalued, or have they?

When you realise that your pocket is being picked continuously by what you have been told which always seems to come from some authority somewhere, some scientist, some politician, some expert, one begins to see that words have not lost any of their power to influence. However we have been taught that power does not reside in words per se because that would be too ridiculous too unscientific but I believe they do. They are hypnotic state changing bundles of power.

As a musician I continuously see the power of the great pop song which seems to have its own life force about it. It seems never to die, some going on for hundreds of years if we classify great choral music as pop songs of their time.

The composers of hymns knew very well the power of words setting quotes from spiritual books to music but something that great works such as these and great poetry have in common is that they allude to something and are not literal. If the words are just what they say literally there is no power in any of the above. Maybe it is our involvement with words in the literal sense that has blinded us to what they can really do however this is not been missed by either the mass media or politicians so why have we lost faith in the power of words?

Maybe our loss of faith comes from the realisation that we cannot easily make change by logical argument on the face of it this seems to fly in the face of what we been taught but the reality is that reasoned debate does not have the power of the words behind them because they are the wrong words in the wrong setting.

Over the past year we have seen that both the UK and in America where one side will play the emotional card against the other sides logical argument and in both cases the emotional card won. The emotional card creates a power that manifests itself in the soundbite just in the same way that a good piece of poetry can eloquently draw to it and emotional response of the listener. Logical arguments not do this unless you are somebody skilled in rhetoric, of which many politicians today clearly are not.

There is power in the poetic then there must be more to words than what they mean consciously, think of the power of a great song lyric to conjure up a memory or a sense of being part of something bigger, great pop songs excel at this, particularly the ones that transcend time.

So how do we get back into the power of the words? Maybe we should put the scientific rational aspect to one side and feel out what the words mean to you as you start to craft the lyrics. Do not tell a listener what it is but paint a picture with words in their mind. Again suspending your belief in what you’ve been taught about the logic of word is a good exercise and obviously reading poetry and lyrics of people who inspire you will help greatly. Take chances with words, express something deep think of it as a courtship with your own language.

Maybe this is what we can take into the New Year; writing great songs. What would you do with this great skill? Dreaming about this might help in putting them down on paper in the most picturesque way.

Vic

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