Pleasure Points of Music
July 25 2010

The Pianobabbler has been thinking. Again. About music. And the music business. Again. Pithily. Compact points.

To wit:

1. Make music for both yourself and others. If you make it only for yourself, others will shut off. If you make it only for others, you will.

2. Never apologize for your tastes. Malign Mozart, love Lady Gaga, diss Davis (Miles, not me, please). In turn, stand ready to have your tastes maligned, loved and dissed.

3. Most listeners receive music with their emotions, ignoring the crucial role of the musician's mind and body in its production.

3.1. Most musicians ignore that most listeners listen only with their emotions. To be entertained. To hear a story.

4. I'd wager that the greatest living musicians enjoy little or no fame.

4.1. If asked, I would name as the greatest living musicians Bobby McFerrin and Take Six.

5. Creativity emerges from negation, as Glenn Gould and others have said. Artists bring forward, create, something from nothing.

5.1. A creative musician must breed his or her own confidence. New creation has no referents against which to judge its quality. Comparisons are odious, but having nothing to which one may make comparisons is unnerving.

5.1.1. Creativity breeds insecurity.

5.2. Art is a form of persuasion.

5.2.1. An artist who does not believe, truly believe, in the beauty and greatness of his or her art cannot expect others to find it beautiful or great.

6. Non-artists depict the artist's work as an effortless reverie. Artists know their work is (a) work, (b) bloodletting.

6.1. We don’t see the bloodletting behind the plated meat we’re served. We don’t hear the bloodletting behind the music we’re served.

6.2. Non-artists think music comes from a box (CD case, radio, iPod,) just as people think food comes from a bag.

6.3. The understanding non-artists think they have of how to run the career of an artist is in truth a work of the non-artist’s creative imagination.

6.3.1. Few artists have, or know they have, the understanding they need to run a career.

7. Divergent thinking: creative. Convergent thinking: commercial. A professional artist who cannot balance the two stands to either wither alone, or suffocate in the crowd.

8. Many musicians never listen to music of the kind they make.

8.1. I rarely listen to jazz. I consumed oceans of it when I was younger. I hear most jazz now as data, because performing it is my living.

8.1.1 Jazz is my living. Living. To live. To exist. To be. Jazz is my being. My inner being. Not an external opiate.

8.2. Jazz is a verb, not a noun. (This explains why the squabbles over What is Jazz? never cease.)

9. Too often musicians forget that language most associates the verb to play with music-making. Music educators forget this as well.

9.1. Play music. Musicians play music.

9.1.1. Play music, play a game. Games and music have syntax, vocabulary, morphology and aesthetic elements. We use these to create the game or the music.

9.1.2. Neither thought nor feeling alone govern this creative process. Instead, the result governs the process: emotional and intellectual pleasure. We play music and games for emotional and intellectual pleasure. Pleasure means a positive or non-negative mental state (simplifying a complex subject.)

9.2. Music is not a game. Games are not music. But both are governed by pleasure. Which is why we play both.

9.3. Play music for the pleasure of both yourself and others (see 1.0 above.)

10. Without play, music must remain silent.

With apologies to L. Wittgenstein.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabber.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.

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