Do we deserve to play well?
- If we think we do not deserve something, it will not matter how hard we try - conviction will be lacking and our desires will fail to materialise. So say the gurus of Quantum Resonance theory, the new wave of the New Age philosophy.
- I believe in my powers of improvisation because for me the act of shaping music in real time is (or can be) arguably the most authentic experience (and I have many others) of my existence as a musician. I have faced all the bugbears which told me that improvisation is by its nature of little worth and doomed to failure as a compositional technique.
- It is an understandable judgement, to conclude that it is not possible, at one sitting and without forethought, to achieve genuine expression to the point of communicating in a valuable way to an audience. We are more or less programmed to think this way, which is why comparatively few people dare to challenge this conception. Hand in hand with this idea comes a more general one, that even interpreting other people's music must be fully planned in advance.
- To face this attitude head-on we need to believe in ourselves, and, just as importantly, to affirm the power of the Present - which is, after all, the only moment in which we can truly act. It is my belief that the true expressive power of music is deeply connected to this sense of the Present, either as an act of interpretation or as an act of spontaneous creation.
- For this reason, I believe that the practice of improvisation, far from being simply the poor relation of composition, can play a vitally important role in musical life, and can actually help us to reconstruct our primary relationship to sound. This is something all of us have, and no amount of negative comparisons with others ("he/she plays better, faster, more expressively," etc.) will rob us of the right to be comfortable with our own creations.
2 comments:
Foi muito refrescante ler este artigo. O blogue, em sentido lato, é sem sombra de dúvida um local privilegiado para a sistematização de ideias e para o poder de síntese. Esta característica impõe-se tanto pela exigência de não cansar os leitores, apanhados na sempre veloz teia da internet, como pelo formato propriamente dito que sugere publicações periódicas sobre pequenos tópicos que o autor decide abordar remetendo para uma temática mais vasta que é a própria orientação do blogue. Neste sentido, e não querendo fugir ao tema do artigo, digo que foi muito refrescante ler estas ideias, que já temos vindo a aflorar nas aulas, organizadas num pequeno texto. Se por um lado concordo plenamente com o que é exposto no artigo, que a confiança num resultado positivo é fundamental para que ele aconteça, também estou convencido de que um espírito crítico, associado a um poder de auto-análise, não deve ser descuidado para que possamos ter margem de progressão e de melhoramento em relação àquilo que criamos. É evidente que nada no artigo diz o contrário, esta foi apenas uma reflexão que me pareceu pertinente partilhar.
The same shame shines over me
The same shame I have had all this time
And all this time the same shame came to me and said
- Oh forget me Oh be free
But I, the forgotten one, cannot free from she
The same shame has been in my name
For the decaying decades
And for this I have only Eternity to blame.
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