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#32
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No, but any half-way decent student can define it to suit themselves.
Look at all the musical greats in history who were panned and hated when they started out. Their compositions despised, their performances derided, their music dismissed as noise or primitive grunting. They didn't change. Stravinski's "The Rite of Spring" didn't transform from the riot-inducing cacophony it was on introduction into beautiful music... the audience changed to recognize the cacophony as beautiful. The same has been true every single time music shifted. They booed Bob Dylan for using an electric guitar, once. He didn't go back, the audience moved forward. |
#33
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#34
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some students have musicality even when they start and others with very good technique never do but they cover the luck of it with expression tricks anyway i agree that musicality and a good technique makes a good musician |
#35
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well, trying expressing the lyrics of the song is a good start ...is it happy,romantic ,angry, funny ? express it
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#36
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But then, I run the risk of being a ‘technician’ on multiple instruments
The article about practicing is priceless – thanks for linking to it Quote:
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No intention of putting any one down here. I simply crave being able to “feel the music and be able to make sounds people enjoy hearing.” And I’m exploring every possible way to get there…
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#37
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Approximately 80% of all Oscars given to date have gone to Method Actors. Classically trained actors (of the sort described in the quote above) can make a good showing, but it is a rare and difficult talent. Most people who try communicating emotion they don't feel end up looking like clowns. |
#39
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#40
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It suggests cynicism, which is not the right attitude at all. The point is - IMO - that the "emotion" contained in (or communicated by) a piece of music is not something that can be expressed any other way. It can't be duplicated, IOW. It's something that happens when the music is played right. Music is what it is; there's nothing hidden, no secret messages. Play it right, and it will do its job. I talked about "meaning" before, but music doesn't "mean" anything beyond itself. Stravinsky had a couple of great quotes, expressing the same idea. "If music is a language, it's an untranslatable one". "Music expresses nothing but itself." IOW, music is a strange kind of proto-language. It resembles language in many ways: we can talk about "phrasing", "vocabulary", etc. But it doesn't represent anything. It just presents. (Rather like the way an abstract painting is not a depiction of anything; it's just an object in its own right.) Its "message" is not even classifiable as "emotion" IMO, in the sense of feelings we can describe as "sadness", "anger", "joy", etc. Those things are mundane, caused by a mix of biology and human interaction. Music is beneath and beyond all that: both more primal and more transcendent. If music moves us to tears - and it can sometimes - we never know why. It probably won't be a "sad song" that does it. It'll just be some kind of sudden connection with our unconscious, like a memory we can't quite recall, or a dream we just woke up and forgot. If music makes us laugh, it won't be because there's a joke in it. (I often laugh at Thelonius Monk's music - because it's just so "right". It's "witty", but there's no way you could translate that wit into verbal terms. It isn't comedy, but is like the musical equivalent of comedy; the kind of comedy that reveals the truth.) In short, you can't "fake" music. You can only play it well, or play it badly. Playing it well means accepting it, in a sense. Not trying to impose your own agenda on it. If you've enough experience of playing live, you know the feeling when it all just "clicks". People talk about being "in the zone". It's like the music is playing itself, and you're just being carried along, like surfing a wave: you might start out with a conscious plan, an idea of controlling the situation, but once you're "up" you know the wave is in command. An audience will recognise that when it happens, and they will "get it". The weird thing is, even though it's totally mysterious, nobody regards it as strange. It's just a "great gig". Sometimes we might be tempted to put it down to the audience just having drunk more than usual (because we don't think we actually played any better than usual). But if they get into it, then so do we, and it becomes a feedback loop. That's music's purpose, IMO. Something that binds us in groups, in a way that feels as if it goes way back to prehistory. We might only be playing a tune that we know was recently written, but somehow - when performed live - it connects into a motherlode, a "collective unconscious"; it becomes an expression of that, not of any trivial idea we might have had when writing it. I once had a lesson in Latin music with a great Brazilian percussionist, and he liked to describe the clave (the 2-bar rhythmic "cell" at the root of most Latin music) as something that was there in the air all the time, like a radio signal. When you played, you just kind of "hooked on" to it; plugged into this invisible, inaudible web and made it manifest. That idea goes way back to ancient Greece and the "harmony of the spheres": the idea that the planets produced tones as they moved across the sky. The crude interpretation of that is that one ought to be able to hear it, like actual music, but IMO it's more like an idea of music: a reflection of the sense that there is an underlying order to nature, which we express - in a more or less clumsy form - in the act of making music. It's as if, when we play music, we are saying: "Here: this is how the world really IS. If the laws of nature made sounds, they would sound something like this." |
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Of course, it's different if you're a solo player performing your own compositions. Especially if the audience knows you, and wants to see some aspect of your personality as part of the performance. (They might be mistaken in that, but the customer is always right... ... we're back to widgets again... ) |
#42
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(Eg, a guitarist adopting mandolin or banjo might not change his approach much, or learn anything significantly new. If he took up the saxophone, however, things ought to be very different....) The important thing that playing more than one instrument does, is reveal the limitations of ALL musical instruments. It throws the nature of "music" itself into sharp relief. Ie, if you play the same tune on guitar and (say) trumpet, it will sound different, of course. The differences are instrumental. Everything that is the same is what the music IS. In a sense, it's what's left when you take the instruments away (or rather when you take away the specific textures that each instrument adds).. Then again, music is nothing without instruments! (I include the voice). The limitations and quirks of instruments dictate the music, to an important degree. Sometimes when we write music, we imagine it in some "perfect" abstract form, an identity that can (in theory) be communicated by any instrument (or voice) that might perform it. Other times, we write for a specific instrument, or voice, or group, to exploit their characteristics. That music would make no sense played on a different instrument (or would make a different kind of sense perhaps). Quote:
I know when I get the deepest emotional charge from playing music, the most passionate connection, it's always when I've managed to play it honestly and correctly, with no emotional input from me (just the desire to hear it properly). Quote:
IMO, the secret (if there is one) is in the detail. Make every note count. Great players can make very simple stuff sound amazing. It's called "expression", of course, but that's a tricky word. I think it's about having the utmost respect for the smallest elements of the music. Like brushwork to a painter: if a painting lives and breathes, it's down to the attention to the brushwork. If each mark wasn't perfectly controlled, the whole thing would not work. You wouldn't say a single brush mark was "expressive" - and the painter certainly was not feeling any emotion when he put it down. But he controlled it just so (through a combination of experience and judgement). (And IMO the analogy works for Jackson Pollock as much as for Rembrandt : if Rembrandt is "classical", Pollock is "jazz" - it looks splashy and uncontrolled, but constant taste and judgement is being applied; accidents are accepted if they work. A jazz musician may often not know how what he is about to play will sound; but he plays it anyway, listens, and goes with it, maybe to somewhere else. Again, it's about giving the music enough respect, allowing it say what it seems to want to say.) |
#43
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In an orchestral situation, you are more limited than you are in say, a blues jam (eg, you don't have a choice of notes) but the ways in which you are limited are a continuum. Quote:
But that doesn't mean they lack the ability, even in a highly-restricted context. |
#44
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ShowcaseYourMusic (covers) ReverbNation (originals) SoundCloud (the Hobo Troubadour) Last edited by Bob1131; 05-18-2012 at 11:19 AM. |
#45
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A person with a good grasp of theory is almost always a musician. A guitar player may or may not be a musician.
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