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

The Master of Demon Valley

The mouth is the door of the mind; the mind is the host of the spirit. Will, intention, joy, desire, thought, worry, knowledge and planning all go in and out through the door. - The Master of Demon Valley.

This is an ancient Taoist text which was translated by Thomas Cleary some twenty years ago and it tells of how Taoist thought and philosophy of ‘the way’ could be used to influence and control the population.
The premise is that all things move from masculine active to feminine receptive or as they express it as Yin and Yang the Yang being the masculine. Language is used to develop that depending on where you are in that arc and not so much about the reality of language expressing truth as we think of it; more in a way of language as a form of magic and spell casting.
The similarities with NLP are interesting with the language being seen as fluid and influential to the mind of the listener.
So if you want to write a rousing song use rousing words, something about love keep saying love, a song about anger, use words that express anger even if they do not make sense in a literal way use language’s power of poetry.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Is in the way you tell ‘em

 A pupil of mine is working on the blues phrasing of Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan and the way that the lines from the former are found in the playing of SRV. However there are differences and he also mentioned to me that he was finding it confusing listening to various versions on the internet of transcriptions of Stevie’s Crossfire.

He asked ‘How is it that different versions of the same solo exist from different transcribers?’ The only way I could answer him was to say ‘please pass the salt’ and then ‘please, pass the salt’ they mean subtly different things. It is all in the dynamics and delivery and that maybe the listener will interpret different meanings in what they hear, a little like saying does your seeing of the colour blue match someone else’s seeing of that colour.

Guitar playing is very much like speaking a language and therefore you need to listen and then play what you hear NOT what someone else tells you they hear. When you have a number of phrases speak them in your tongue make the phrases communicate and remember that what you hear may not be what others hear. Hear with your feelings and not with your intellect, this will be more truthful; then hone it down like a child would do with language.

Vic



www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Three days of playing in a rock band – learn the tricks of the trade.

 

Giving up ownership of your inspiration

The idea that we are not the source of the songs and that we only act as a conduit for the music is an appealing thought for me.
Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his acceptance speech to the Prince of Asturias Foundation were he said the skills of playing guitar were handed to him by a young Spanish guitarist whom he met in Montreal and his lyrics were inspired by the great Spanish poet Lorca. Here is the link to that speech on YouTube https://youtu.be/VIR5ps8usuo
He said of Lorca that he taught him to find his voice even though he understood well the rules of poetry he did not have a voice until he read Lorca. The young Spaniard who taught him the fundamental chords of the guitar gave him the ingredients for all of his songs in six chords, in essence Cohen passed the ownership of his songs back to the land of Spain because the inspiration was rooted in its soil although he personally has no hereditary link.
There seems something fundamentally magical about giving up ownership of your inspiration; it seems to open the flood gates to ideas, pictures, words and feelings as if brought by the muse’s from somewhere else.
So much of education is about being ‘in your head’ whereas the area of creativity is linked to something less formed and something more abstract.

Vic

www.bluescamp.co.uk

Break the Rules

The successful artist that break the rules of the expected way to do things interests me. They are the ones that point to the answer to what makes a great musician.
These anomalies, the Muddy Waters, the Captain Beefheart’s  the John Lee Hooker’s, the Django Reinhardt’s and the Bob Dylan’s of this world are the ones who do not know scales, cannot read music, they are often the illiterate, the ones who play from the heart, the drug takers, the heavy drinkers, the iconoclasts, the womanisers, the radicles and the ones who think outside the box.
The list of these characters includes the deformed, the mentally ill, the revolutionaries, the anarchists and traditionally the ones who get arrested, thrown into jail, and die young.   The fact that rule breaking and the bending of normality seems to be inherent for these people.
Look at those you teach or work with who are different and you will see something powerfully creative in them and that is something which can be tapped into to.
Jimi Hendrix wasn’t necessary the best guitarist for his time actually that fell to the likes of Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow but Jimi took what he heard and coloured it through the prism of his experiences and personality.
So let us embrace the different and the awkward and counter intuitive (or counter intellectual) and make something expressive and beautiful and challenging.

Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk check it out

Language tells the mind what to see and what remains hidden and it is language that makes the world exist in our mind. Without the words we have no way to frame it.

An interesting concept, that words not only reflect but also frame how we think.
We can  see evidence of  this in national consciousness, for instance the poetic language of Iran leads to the rather unusual (to the West) allegorical political statements that we are unfamiliar with, which sound as if the speakers  are trying to hide something. Whereas the rather simplistic English used by the Americans lead to the rather blunt and politically aggressive statements which are more familiar. 
There is a theory that the very essence of language; the words, not only are the tools for expressing our thoughts but may also be the things that create our ability to think in a certain way. So if you have a word for something you can experience it, if you do not then you cannot experience it.
Subjugated people have throughout history had their language and their beliefs taken away or debased in order for ethnic cleansing to happen. We as a nation had this happen to us where the native tongue of the British was taken away by the Romans and then that was taken away by the Saxons to be then taken away and debased by the Normans.
Adding music to words can make the effect of language more potent, think of the religious use of music and language with chanting and song. Lyrics are hypnotically powerful because of the rhythms and it is easily possible for music to induce a religious trance. I am not sure why this is but I would guess that the rhythms impact the unconscious aspect of the memory stopping the intellectual analysis of the words and allowing the unconscious effect to take place.
Words carry an emotional resonance, also the way words are spoken changes that level of resonance. Words such as ‘Love’ and ‘Trust’ carry an emotional resonance which will be different to different listeners depending on their experience. Words such as Hate and Greed are so loaded with emotional meaning and are often used by governments and society to create the organising effect of the ‘Leopard outside’ making a community bond through fear. This technique is being used for everything from Fracking (lack of energy), to Terrorism (fear of the apocalypse from the men with beards) to GM (the lack of food security). The truth as always is more complex and nuanced than that and often the deciding point left out is someone is going to make a lot of money out of the desired result of fear but we are being corralled by the smell of fear or moral panic.
The language that we use frames our personal world and language is the way your world functions. Now it is our turn to use language in a way that is truly powerful, with music.
Vic
 www.Bluescampuk.co.uk