October 17, 1999

Something that has been on my mind lately is this thing about overplaying. This need to play as many notes as possible without leaving room to breathe. It is (in my opinion) more challenging to just leave the phrase alone. Let it exist. Well of coruse you have to create it. When you create a phrase of music, you are creating a new life. But once it's created, give it some room to live!! Do your parents see that you are for example, a slow runner? If so, do they see it fit to furnish you with a third leg? Of course not (if you answered yes...well...you have bigger things to worry about besides music I think). You are who you are. A LIFE, AN ENTITY, IS UNCONDITIONAL. This goes for music as well.

Not to change the subject, but I came to this conclusion the other day: Overplaying on your instrument is the equivalent of a mid-life crisis. Perhaps you feel like you haven't done enough with music and that you have something to prove. You focus most of your creativity on your chops which leads to thinking in terms of quantity and not quality.

Once you get into that thought process, it's no longer about music. It's about materialism. The problem with relying on material posessions is that you get bored easily and you think that the only cure is to have MORE material posessions. Putting this to music, you will cram as many MORE notes into an already suffocating passage of music.

Perhaps you are not writing music but only playing it instead. You see three notes. The three notes have a purpose. The three notes are for you to play. But you think the three notes are BORING. Already you are transcending into materialism. You are thinking what you can do to make these three notes BETTER; to make them more INTERESTING. You go through techniques, theories, history fragments, etc. in your mind (all of which at this point are doing nothing more than consuming SPACE), trying to find ways to modify these three notes. You can change them if you want. You can do whatever you want (music is FREE) but there is nothing you can do to make the three notes any BETTER. They have a purpose. The are a part of a structure. . .adding to the flow of the structure. The notes have a purpose within the stucture. The composer knew of this purpose even before he BUILT the structure. It represents his/er honest feelings and is not meant to be changed for then it would no longer be honest. You want to make the three notes better? What could be better than the honest flow?

Let's go back to composing. We start with a creative state ment. We can bring this statement to life through music, painting, poetry, or some other medium. We've chosen to bring it to life through music.

People believe either you have music inside yourself or you don't. It's not the music per se, but rather the message. Everyone has a message. The message is half the music. The other half is the sound. We bring the sound to the message and we have music.

The music has to be carefully balanced to keep the flow of the creative message consistent. This is the part that takes practice. No matter what you do with the music, no matter how you por tray it, it's the flow that can't suffer. That doesn't mean to keep it all sounding the same, because there's always the danger of having it become stagnant. No. The sound of the music changes. . .it can crash and recede or it can change patterns in any specific or non-specific order. But the flow must always remain consistent as respect to the entity of the music. That is more imprtant than aesthetics. It is what DEFINES aesthetics. . .if you can see. . .it's more imprtant than the chops, quality or quantity of sound, it is more important than the number of people playing or listening to the music. Embrace the flow. Embrace the entity of the music. Treat it with respect and your rewards will be greather than anything that can could come from chops, quantity, etc. The differences between music styles are the same as the differences between ethnicity. Every being, eithe rmusical or biological has its own characteristics that make it different from the other. Color, attraction, quantity, etc. Everything beyond that is the same. Everything felt beyond the material senses is what is real. The flow of existence is constant. To respect the flow is to respect ourselves. Savor the moment. . .all else will follow.

September28, 1999

The end for now . . . nice day for somethin' . . .

Words of Wisdom: "Ever have any white chocolate milk?"