Sometimes we call them left or right brains

Date: 2/2/13

Orchestra: Chamber

Repertoire rehearsed: mainly Kiki. We touched upon a few other things too.

Attendance: great!

Little things I noticed: 

   That giant tree of white tape is still on the floor. Whatever is/was that for anyway? 

   The record player was back! I tried to hide it from the kids, but to no avail...

Notes:

Since this is the first entry for Chamber, I will start with the most basic, and THE MOST IMPORTANT thing for me to tell you (but don't take it personally).

I still hear a bunch of notes.

Notes are not the same thing as music.

Listening to notes is like trying to live in a blueprint of a house. You can’t live in a blueprint of a house. It’s impossible. The house has to be built, or realized first. And that’s why we are here. We, as performers are the construction workers of the music. We see ideas represented on pieces of paper, and then we realize it. We build each piece for the audience so they can have access to them and enjoy the realizations of these ideas. Sheet music (and the notes written on them) are ideas, nothing more. The sheet music itself is not music. The rest of the job is up to us, the performers. It’s a big job, really. Music is as vague as anything in this universe can get. But we have to make sense out of them - to make a story out of a bunch of awkward tadpoles swimming around in what seems like a complete random order and form at first. But when it’s done well, it’s possibly THE most effective communication devise, the most direct language, and the most effective form of expression there is in existence.

(not doing any of this, is just like re-drawing the blueprint, it still is just an idea. Or perhaps more dangerously, like building a faulty house...)

Please listen to more music. And when you do, don’t try to think about it or control how you feel. Just get lost in it. Let the music take you to places. Let the music haunt you, terrify you, make you laugh, cry, dance, cheer, scream, whatever. You will not understand music so long as you don’t stop everything you were doing and thinking whatever it was that was occupying your brains. Let go. Listen. Float. Then comes imagination. The sound will become visible, or start to form shapes, or color. Then they move, and change, and transform into something else. Through these movements and transformations, comes a story. A vague one, but a story nevertheless. And it's these stories that make music do what it does. No, you don’t come up with them, they will come to you. Trust me.

Do I sound like one of those new age hippies? Does this seem like nonsensical mumbo-jumbo? Maybe I do, and maybe it does. But I speak from a very conscious mind. Conscious minds are great for doing busy works (like writing this blog, and organizing concerts), but less so for creativity, unfortunately. And sometimes the conscious minds cannot clearly express or understand what the unconscious minds experience. But we ALL have both sides. We just forget to use the power of the other a little too often.