The world is made of words

The world is made of words, and if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. Terence McKenna

In the beginning was the word in fact it is possible as the myths say that life only continues because we still tell the story of life. It is certainly true that once we have a name for something we have some way of controlling it. Like with music if we know what key it is in, what the chords are, how the rhythm is constructed and we have labelled those with words we have a way of manipulating information and we can transfer the ideas to something else or to replicate it.

We need to give voice and name to the things that we want but we are encouraged in this society to contemplate the things that we do not want in our lives such as illnesses, depression, lack of money,  all because someone is making money out of your fear.

Think about the words that you use maybe this could be within your work or just your day-to-day life. Be aware of the power of words being used on you, this is not a new thing of course it was done through religion being told from the pulpit, what to believe and how to be. Now is done through the media. I am sure that when we look back will see how ridiculous this is just in the same way 1940’s and 50’s Pathe News Reels set the tone of the messages which were condescending and aimed at the naïve.

 We need to speak in a commanding way using words that create desired outcomes we need to see and hear and recognise words that are being used on us to control our lives so that we take back control from the media and society in general.

It is now time to wake up and build a new a new life with new words. Consider why songs are powerful. Listen to the following songs in the days to come

We will Rock You, Wild Thing, Riders on the Storm, All Right Now, Moondance, and The Boys Are Back in Town.

You can add many to this list, they all command driven lyrics telling you something not asking you, telling you with authority.

So go and change things

 Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  summer school, learn to rock  

Something Wrong With You

There is one ‘right’, ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ way for human brains and human minds to be configured and to function (or one relative narrow ‘normal’ range into which the configurational functioning of the human brains and minds ought to fall). If your neurological configuration and functioning (and as a result your ways of thinking and behaving) diverged substantially from the dominant standard of ‘normal’ then there is something wrong with you. – Nick Walker.

When you first read the above you would agree, however this was written by someone who has autism and the article it was taken from demolishes the idea that there is something ‘wrong’ and replaces it with something ‘different’. The power of words is such that we agree to many things without a challenge because we are told them as a fact and therefore what to believe.

With that in mind listen to the news and be aware how much you are being told. See how that resonates with you then challenge it by thinking, ‘why this why now’ and then see what happens to the BBC spell. This process goes on all the time I see it in schools with the idea that a child who thinks differently has a ‘labelled’ condition, the path to hell is paved with good intent and it is easy to say that the child has a problem but the awareness of difference is important here as it might suggest that the context needs looking at.

Anyone who has had lessons with me in the past who were dyslexic would attest that when you approach things from a different angle will see skills and strategies that the quote ‘normal’ do not have. I make a point when being told that somebody is dyslexic or has some other condition that that may benefit certain aspects of playing music. This is often greeted with surprise by the parent but it is true that these people are far more sensitive musically than the people who are the norm.

Now I am not saying that these people will not find life in this society difficult because there is a problem with society and that is the issue. I also do not have an answer because there isn’t one, in actual fact this is born from the same thought structure as the problem itself. However embracing difference is something that we need to do and need to be aware of. Being able to spot dualism in language patterns and why it happens in the way that it does goes some way to expose how language is used ‘on you’.

So how does that feedback into music and the arts? The last thing you want as an artist is to be normal; to embrace difference and find its beauty and its skills whether that is yourself or in others and work with it creating new possibilities. Someone who is autistic will have strategies in order to fit in and these are resources that we often ignore because they come from someone who has ‘something wrong with them’ however in another point in the timeline these people would have been the seers, navigators and healers in the community, but not now. I guess that is the price progress.

as things move in cycles it is possible that we could return to a point in time when things we consider as a medical condition now will be viewed more optimistically but I cannot see that in the foreseeable future. We can make a start by realising that the benchmarks of normality that we had set for ourselves are not real and to some extent they have been put there by people who wish to control aspects of society. So be troublesome! The pointers for this are the artists and musicians of the 1960s who obviously had some form of ‘labelled condition’ in retrospect such as Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and at least to some extent John Lennon (addictive personalities, compulsive behaviours and all on the spectrum) and they all had a massive CIA and FBI file on each of them, I think that says it all.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three day music summer school for rock

Set Fire to the world

What is needed to start a fire? Dry kindling and then dry wood of suitable size for certain levels of burning, starting small at first and then gradually getting bigger, up to the big logs and something to create a spark. Once alight the fire needs to be feed and watched over.

There is most definitely a sequence that happens when lighting a fire, plenty of preparation and some level of ability to light it which includes positive action. Something else worth considering is what is the fire to do? Is it to keep you warm? To cook with or something else?  This will affect the way that the fire is built and where. So let as use the metaphor and ‘set fire to the world’ or let us consider ‘Fire in the head’ which is the old term for inspiration.

What I find interesting here is that these terms actually explained very well what is required to be successful with things artistic. If the ground is not ready for the fire to be lit then you are not going to be successful. If the territory is not ready for the type of music you have then your fire will not start, there has got to be enough tinder to get started and then you need enough fuel to build the fire.

The world might be ready for you but if you do not create the spark then nothing will happen either, interestingly enough many fire lighting skills require you to blow and breathe at various stages to feed the fire which is very similar to marketing and speaking about your product and being interviewed on radio, TV and the Internet maybe you need to say something that is incendiary.

I think this is something that we miss in the way that we have been prepared by music courses and the general sort of fantasia of programs like The Voice and The X Factor that we can just go on and play or perform in some form of circus. Now for some people, in fact very few people, that might be way of succeeding but I find it interesting that the biggest artists like Adele, Ed Sheeran and Amy Winehouse did not take this pat. Adele began on the road to her success by doing Myspace then small gigs, radio and TV sometimes going out with just herself and a guitarist to do some of the early shows.

We can continue the fire metaphor as far as we want because it can also lead to burnout and most fires do need to burnout and to be rebuilt and to some extent that is exactly what Adele did in between the various albums. Maybe thinking about strategies for success in this way is better for artistic people because there is a feeling to it that makes sense. Many marketing strategies are so much ‘in your head’ being dry and expressionless that they are difficult to feel your way through where something that uses an element such a fire is much easier to envisage and taps into an intuitive level of expression.

This it does not to be world domination, it could be something simple like developing the level of teaching that you have at the moment, or moving into a new area of work or just building up the numbers of people having lessons just try it out and see how you get on. I will watch out for smoke on the horizon.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk  three days of playing in a music summer school.

We have always been clever we should just stop acting dumb

 A few years ago I spent time working on some skills like flint knapping and what became clear was how clever our ancestors were. Not only could they hunt but they had the make everything required for hunting, the arrow heads, the arrow shaft, fletching, the bow, the cordage, everything; and if it did not work they starved.

It must have been the same for the musicians, same with everything, clothing, housing and fishing. We look at people in the past as superstitious and stupid, the fact is we do not have anything like the practical skills of our ancestors. Even going back to the Edwardians or the Victorians it has been estimated that the average person was far more intelligent and practical than we are, however that is not the story that we get at all.

The point here is that we are not tested by the life that we live like our forbears and therefore we get lazy when it comes to the way that we think and problem solve this leads to stress and the usual problems with the lifestyle that we have, including increased rates of depression.

For the artist and the musician we really need to break away from the formulaic approach that we are given by school, college and university. The problem is the context of compliance, in fact that word is used in everything from child protection to health care etc. now in essence that is very laudable but it has the effect of strangling the life out of things because no one wants to take risks. The risks that I am talking about are just the risk of non-conformity where you are just doing something different, as a teacher that might be not having a lesson plan that Ofsted can look at. The path to hell is paved with good intent and that is the problem here, because we are slowly destroying ourselves by making life a form of personal slavery.

I see this a lot with players who end up as machines of technique and not true artists. Think about it, none of the famous musicians were technically the best, far from it, that would have been the bedroom guitarist, who have always been there; the guy that was so screwed up he never left his bedroom but now because of YouTube he does not need to leave his bedroom to get online.

The great artists have something to say with their music and that means that they need to break rules, break the taboos, the buzz words of Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll the life style of the Dionysian cult approach to life to embrace the divine needed taboo breaking as a prerequisite.

So what is the solution for this? First of all and this is only opinion as is everything I write is, we need to realise that people had solutions for things that we do not use anymore, a form of mythic thinking which is great for creative thinking a case for revelation where you know the answer without justification. Also the understanding that we are not that clever if we are only using logic because we only need to enter a form of quantum theory to realise that form is difficult to justify and maybe nothing is real let alone an idea maybe all these things create some form of agency that makes things happen but they are not in essence real they only manifest the illusion of the real.

So do not be dumb, dream big and make something happen just like the weirdos from the past.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.ukthree days of playing in a band

Trees and Hedgerows and their significance to artistic thinking

I have a friend who is involved with the Wildlife Trust in Kent and we were discussing the rationale behind taking out old hedgerows and the subsequent effect of topsoil erosion (as you do). The scientific logical argument behind doing this is that if a field is bigger you can use machinery and make the work more effective however in due course we discover the long-term effect is detrimental; a little bit like killing the goose that lays the golden egg, you may get short-term benefit by long-term disaster.

I grew up in Cornwall and I did actually meet some old farm labourers who had lived and worked on the land and had some of the old-time wisdom that often feature in West Country jokes. One of these is the guy turns up in a flash car asking directions from the old farmer ‘so what is the quickest way to get to Scotland from here’ the old farmer thinks for a while and then says’ best not to start from here’. That sums up the problem that we have currently, many things including the education system, health care and the environment are best fixed some place other than where we are.

There were written cases around the time of the enclosure acts where trees that had figured in the lives of generations of a family suddenly became the possession of a landowner where in the past it sat on common land. This was one of the biggest forms of theft that we experienced in this country and something that is rarely taught in any significant way in schools, that the people with money stole the land by changing the law and disenfranchised ordinary people like you and me.

Old style thinking that the tree lived on the land, and had done for centuries, and did not belong to anyone it belonged to the land. Now this argument works incredibly well when it comes to environmental thinking, because if that tree has a right to exist and has some form of ownership of the land it sits on then by keeping it the tree effectively safeguards all of the environmental infrastructure that it supports and is supported by. This is a simple way of expressing a complex idea just as listening to something in your head and expressing it musically is easier than explaining how the music and is created theoretically.

The problem with the intellectual approach is it is far too simplistic and seems to be inefficient when dealing with complex situations such as the environment and expression in music. So going back to the idea of the hedgerow and the incredible diversity created by borderlands (it is well known that diversity increases in areas that are bordering something else, such as a shoreline, forest edge or in this case the edge of a field) maybe this is a good way of looking at music that does not sit easily within a genre in that it might create more musical biodiversity, the Beatles and their use of Indian music as an example.

So there we have it music and hedgerows and we have not even got into the song of the blackbird and thrush which of course along with the Oak, Hawthorn and Apple would give us plenty of material for the English folk music tradition.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk  play in a band for three days learn the tricks of performance

Can you beat the system?

The story of the music business is full of tales of manipulation, malpractice and sexual misconduct, rather like Hollywood. Courtney Love in her book detailed the way that money is shared out from an advance showing that the bands are left with very little after payment to the manager, payment for videos, recordings et cetera. So can you beat the system or maybe better can you work in another system?

I pondered this over the years as most of my work involves education and I am interested in finding meaning in such a way that I can explain things from my experience and the experience of others.

 I had a very close-run thing on the success front in the early days with the band fronted by a singer who was the son of a well-known film star, there was so much gameplay going on but I was not old enough to spot how to deal with it. I preferred to believe the people in charge had my best interests at heart; problem was (and is) in a capitalist system no one has your best interests at heart there is only pursuit of profit.

 Unfortunately that is the reality, whether that is the production and research into medicines or whether that is selling your house, no one really has your interest at heart only the bottom line and as long as the incompetence is not bad enough for someone to be sued then they get away with it, ask anyone who is buying and selling a house. As long as we can see this then we can work around it or at least expect it, so for musicians why does someone what to book you, because they like you or they expect you to fill the venue?

So you can go along the lines of doing something that actually helps people to achieve something or realise something. The first could be teaching them so they reach a certain grade or get to Music College, the second point is to play for someone’s wedding or birthday or a company’s event putting over the corporate message. Now these have a defined measurable outcome (maybe more flexible in the second instance but if people are having fun then you both win) the point is it is measurable, so that is playing to the system of transactions. The point is that you are not turning up in the Blues Brothers style playing Blues in a Country and Western Club. You would be amazed how many young musicians do not think this through. 

Look at how you can cooperate with others may be from another system so from this perspective music can be used in some form of training, the people doing the training are from a different mind-set. You can bring to the mix a perspective developed from performing and skills from teaching. Lessons learnt from teaching adults can be very valid and insightful in business because one learns a lot about the inner thoughts and beliefs of ‘mature’ people and teaching teenagers may afford you an insight to how to deal with problem adults!

The American entrepreneur and business thinker Jay Abraham used this idea of cross business thinking for his work. A problem in one business may have been solved in another sector so go and look and see how other businesses work. In dealing with another system in order to beat your own could take you into corporate training and teaching an instrument as a metaphor for learning other skills or using performance abilities in something other than the standard concert situation.

Remember that systems are created by people and because the system, whether it is monetary or otherwise is in existence now, does not mean that it will be in existence in the future. Music historically has always been on the cutting edge of systems and the economy, going there first, so take your music somewhere different. The holy grail of the recording contract may not be of any importance any more at any level for a performer and the degree of no importance for the educator.

Once upon a time everybody believed in the divine right of kings…………..

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk play in a rock band learn the secrets .

Playing the guitar is a beautiful thing

Playing the guitar is beautiful but there are some people who teach it can make it boring or worse, a misery; that does take some doing.

I was contacted by an ex pupil of mine that had just received his music degree but in his words ‘Uni was good apart from my guitar lessons sadly. The man who “taught me” showed me how much a teacher can really affect your enjoyment of music! So If I didn’t seam grateful at the time... thank you! Because it probably got me through my performance module alone!’

I have always been aware of the teachers who have the unique gift of making the guitar boring I think a lot of reasons for this is the assumption that the guitar should be taught something like a classical instrument. No offense if you are learning classical guitar that is a different matter altogether but not if you are learning a contemporary form of guitar playing.

I see this type of thinking a lot among teachers that there is a correct way to do something and this may be the case if you’re learning a strict discipline of playing for a particular instrument but as soon as you get outside the confines and strictures of a way of thinking then there cannot be an ordained way of playing.

Remember that all of the great contemporary players had some form of idiosyncratic way of delivering music from a Hendrix playing with his teeth approach to the Jeff Healey ‘play the guitar on your lap’ or a Keith Richards ‘playing the different tuning’ to Eric Clapton ‘play so loud that your amp is about to blow up’ sort of thing. None of these follow the correct way of playing guitar with the thumb at the back of the neck and the hand correctly placed over the guitar strings.

So what is it that we need to do? I would suggest that a good teacher is an alchemist, one who finds which ingredients are available within the pupil and by mixing these with the ingredients that the teacher has, can create something transformational there is really no way that you can know what the pupil is capable of and a best guess it is something that is completely beyond what you believe is possible. That has often been my experience but it is only my experience if I allow them to push my ideas beyond my comfort zone.

Education sadly has become very little about opening the mind and very much about social management and ticking boxes, people asking questions about tempo and about technicality when in actual fact these things are taken in the stride of the pupil if they are excited about the prospect of discovering how brilliant they are about being creative.

Because education and higher education in particular is all about the dollar it has become an economic machine that needs to be fed creating much in its likeness; very different from opening the mind like a parachute to explore the creative landscape from a distance but still infused with the excitement of the jump.

So think about what makes music exciting for you, ditch all the stuff that you found boring and go for that. Technical material that is required in order to make stuff exciting should be put over in such a way that people are desperate to learn it.

Vic www.bluescampuk.co.uk