"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all" Billie Holiday.
I guess I get your point, JeffD, but I can't quite why you see this as a motivator for YOUR music.
"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all" Billie Holiday.
I guess I get your point, JeffD, but I can't quite why you see this as a motivator for YOUR music.
Everybody did this impersonation thing in their youth. It may be a consolation that many of those attractive guys were really into other attractive guys. Forgetting impossible dreams and starting the real journey into our real selves should have taken care of all that by now.
And maybe we can hear again those songs which were inadvertently connected to sad occasions (I vividly remember that garbage can I dropped that Barclay James Harvest csssette into after my girlfriend had left me, but today I can listen again to "Hymn" and with a grim smile notice what you can do with just two chords). Music carries unplanned emotion and it can form character in unexpected ways.
the world is better off without bad ideas, good ideas are better off without the world
Music is both parts. Think of language as it's very similar. You can't fully express your thoughts, feelings, ideas, knowledge, etc., without a firm grasp of vocabulary but you can talk all day without ever saying anything.
I can see the Neil Young and James Taylor, they were/are cool........ya kinda lost me on the Don Johnson...............???
Music is different from language in this - if it not a piece or a tune or song that you composed, then it is someone else's message, not your own. Perhaps you can interpret it, decorate it, add some drama, whatever, but that is not expressing yourself, in the way that talking is.
Music has a lot to say, of course it does. I try (as best I can) to let the music do the saying. Music has a lot to say. Me, not so much.
Jeff, I think you do yourself a disservice. The types of music you play is an expression of you. That one person will play a tune note for note like the original say something. Another will make it their own, that also says something. Either can be good or not, but not due to the approach, but by the application. I see music as a language just with notes rather than words. Music speaks from the soul, the mind, and emotions, all three, or none. I do write and my best music comes from emotions and were stimulated by huge events. You might not know the event, but you can feel the emotion or pain. Just my thoughts.
Tony Huber
1930 Martin Style C #14783
2011 Mowry GOM
2013 Hester F4 #31
2014 Ellis F5 #322
2017 Nyberg Mandola #172
Everything you do is of course an expression of your "self." I think what Jeff is saying, wrt music, is that the repertoire and approach with which he's familiar is of the type that originates from score or previously established elsewhere. I don't think it's of a particular disservice or anything like that - it's his perspective and his experience (I'm only contrasting this by example of all the music/playing where this is wholely not the approach).
We really could have just distilled it thus: reading vs improv - and all the shades/approaches between
OK… OK… OK… !
I think I am done with all this. Our discussions/disagreements here have lots to do with differences in semantics, definitions (self, expression, music, genre, etc.) and neurological conceptions.
Though interesting and thought-provoking, I am truly ready to leave all of this thread to those who prefer the back-and-forth of it. I want to get back to my instruments and play music as well as I can with whatever feelings I can muster. I might stop by on this thread to see if the thread breaks the record of the Blue Chip threads but in the meantime, let's all play some music. I have some mandolins and fiddles that are calling out to me.
Jim
My Stream on Soundcloud
19th Century Tunes
Playing lately:
1924 Gibson A4 - 2018 Campanella A-5 - 2007 Brentrup A4C - 1915 Frank Merwin Ashley violin - Huss & Dalton DS - 1923 Gibson A2 black snakehead - '83 Flatiron A5-2 - 1939 Gibson L-00 - 1936 Epiphone Deluxe - 1928 Gibson L-5 - ca. 1890s Fairbanks Senator Banjo - ca. 1923 Vega Style M tenor banjo - ca. 1920 Weymann Style 25 Mandolin-Banjo - National RM-1
Darn! I was going to wax eloquent.
'Zackly. Stephen King said it best (and I might have already mentioned this above, can't remember): an amateur waits for inspiration, a pro gets up in the morning and gets to work.
The musician's job is to entertain, not to share and bare - regardless of his or her mood at the moment. Anything else is letting the audience down.
Expressing feelings is the audience's job: by clapping, laughing, crying, booing, heckling, dancing, cheering, flicking their Bics, or getting up and walking out. (That last one is what mine usually do.)
An amateur like me would like to be in control of their technique enough that they can express themselves without having to think about it too hard. To that end, one must practise and experience playing in public.
OK, that makes me laugh.Virgins who had never been far from home singing "House of the Rising Sun" as if they really meant it.
I haven't been to folk clubs much but the sight and sound of earnest middle class folk singing songs about labouring down pit, drinking, fighting and the other when they don't appear to have ever done much of any always makes me chuckle.
Bren
But you see, for some folks music is (much) more than mere entertainment. Personally, from a very early age, I've always derived much more from music, and the other arts. Sometimes I enjoy being only "entertained" by music. However most often I enjoy being stimulated in more ways (or you might say - my preferred style of being entertained involves active engagement on a number of levels). I do understand, however, that for many and perhaps most - music is simply entertainment, plain and simple. Mileage varies, naturally.
I would submit - an entertainer's job is to entertain. But there are many roles and functions of music, just as there are many types of musicians and approaches to playing.
But, at the end of the day, those who you may believe take more praise than they should, give a LOT to music. Isn't that more valuable than a little quirky personality?
I don't see it. If that were the case Chico Marx (who I love) would be the most significant musician in history. Music can inspire, console, lead us to love or regret, to war or peace or happiness or sadness, etc. etc. music can move huge audiences or just the musician practicing all alone.
It's magic.
Johnny Cash's stunning cover of Hurt comes to mind. Should someone have told him to cut out that interpretive crap, and that it wasn't his song?
I'm getting agitated, but I don't like somebody telling me what my job is.
Mitch Lawyer
Collings MF5V, Schwab #101 5 string
1918 Gibson A, 1937 Gibson T-50 tenor guitar
Jones OM, Hums bowlback
And then there's the probably vast hordes of mostly-unknown studio musicians.
They presumably don't need stage personality or a well-developed character, they just need to be really good musicians who can think outside the box and invent new stuff as needed for whatever project they're working on, and of course not be sociopaths who tick off the other musicians and people they have to work around.
My first clue as to exactly how important studio musicians are to music in general, was when I saw the Carol Kaye interview:
(or direct link)
Although I guess even studio musicians *start* somewhere else other than studios; in Kaye's case she says she started out playing live gigs, so some degree of audience-appeal and/or 'character' would presumably be necessary to land those gigs in the first place.
Having recently read dead words on a page aloud, from an old doctor by the name of Seuss, I like thinking that interpretation is *not* where it's at.
----
Playing a funky oval-hole scroll-body mandolin, several mandolins retuned to CGDA, three CGDA-tuned Flatiron mandolas, two Flatiron mandolas tuned as octave mandolins,and a six-course 25.5" scale CGDAEB-tuned Ovation Mandophone.
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This is rather it then. For a decade or more I've been compelled to get on here and write thousands of posts, all really saying much the same thing: that humans are diverse; some find satisfaction in the parochial or familiar, while others seek to explore. I find music to be of endless rewards and worthy of unlimited pursuit. For others, perhaps it is more a predictable quantity, hobby or pastime. I regard both perspectives more or less equally valid. But I can predictably be found on forums offering my experience, and suggesting there IS much to be found in music and art. I find it tends to give back what we put into it. As a student of art, I've spent most of my adult life extolling the virtues of art, and have had plenty of opportunity to defend this perspective against skeptics and others. Modernity is largely ambivalent if not downright hostile toward Art. But it's as with anything else: some see the world through rational lens of business, others the rhetoric of politics; I prefer poetics.
Never practice. Play. If it's not fun, why bother? We are adults, not children. It's different to learn as an adult. Adults learn by trying things and looking for information when we get stuck. Just play, enjoy the process, you'll get better over time and at some point if you feel like you'd really like to practice scales, that's when you will do it.
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