I've been away from my blog for quite a while now. Two dead computers in as many weeks didn't help. Anyway . . .
Writing, for me, has always been a difficult process. There is skill involved in formulating ideas and then verbalizing them so that others can understand the meaning. I never considered myself a writer until I was encouraged by my NYU professors. After years of putting off the inevitable, I'm here putting thoughts and words together, trying to express something coherent about that which I love: Music--an art so abstract that very often words lose all meaning. Every day I look at that fancy diploma from NYU and ask myself what I'm going to do about it. I worked hard to achieve my goals at NYU and every day my diploma looks down at me and asks, "have you done anything worthwhile today? Have you lived up to the goals and dreams you had then?" I will admit that each day that I have nothing written here feels like a disappointment. Whom do I disappoint? Myself.
I often feel the same ambivalence about playing music. I put it off and then feel disproportionately guilty for failing to create something daily. It's time to stop the nonsense and sit down and make something every day (with maybe weekends off for R&R). With that in mind, I hope you will indulge my use of this space in the service of my Art, as well as my continuing development as a musician, teacher and facilitator. I'm not one for keeping journals anymore, but this may act as a record of my process. After all, once the core curriculum is understood, every art is a process.
In the ephemeral world of music, we're often left without evidence that anything actually occurred except perhaps snippets of a memory or a feeling. The artist's hospitality allows us to ride the wave of their creativity into and out of that experience. Receiving the experience is different from that of expressing and giving life to music, yet the two are joined and become greater through the sharing. Participating in creating spontaneous music with others is an altogether different type of experience and process requiring openness and acceptance of the participants. Here, I find that two ideas are important regardless of the experience, the first is non-judgment, the second is the release of expectation.
Judgment and expectation impede any artistic experience. I know this from personal experience. I know this, because these are the two evil characters that stop my creativity in its tracks. I know this, because, lacking openness to new experiences, builds rigid mental constructs. Once that happens, creativity idles, dies, or at the very least becomes so walled up that nothing new can develop. As a teacher and facilitator, I am sometimes shocked by the young age at which these two attitudes sometimes develop.
Creativity, like life, requires light, air, nourishment. It can grow wonderfully wild, or it can be trained gently into classical beauty. Either way, it becomes something that lives and breathes itself forward. So, in the end, perhaps I'm writing to inspire myself and you all are welcome to come along.
