Writing rehearsals is always a terrifying process for me: how to "write" music? Better, how to compose music (although I do sit with a manuscript book and pencil)? So, dear Web visitor, where does music come from? Not from me, certainly, but what may I do, what can I do, to encourage music to visit, the muse to descend?
Music favours the informed mind, practised hands, a welcoming heart and the alert, engaged attention. If this is so, then:
1. I gather together my repertoire of kernel and seed ideas, in various stages of construction and assembly, extending them in developing variations;
2. Apply myself to the calisthenic of guitar playing;
3. Call upon the muse for help;
4. Commit myself to the process.
And the process still terrifies me.
Today, following my morning sitting, reading and composing, I set off for Davis-Kidd Booksellers to catch up on recent publications. Excitement! Christopher Small (whose "Music - Society - Education" and "Music of the Common Tongue" I read several years ago) has a new book - "Musicking" - which is now awaiting me at the end of Roger Scruton's "The Aesthetics of Music".
There has been a fairly recent development in academic musicology. Academics who have been moved by rock music, rather than (or in addition to) the greats of the Western tonal harmonic tradition, seek to justify and explain rock's meaning/s and value as music. This in contrast to earlier work which addresses rock in sociological, rather than purely musical, terms. Simon Frith's "Performing Rites", my reading while in Chicago with ProjeKt Two, is a good example of this. Frith & Small, Lucy Green & Janet Wolff, Kramer, McClary, are very much at the other end of the pole to Scruton (a radical conservative). Post-modernist and feminist musicology has (at least) as much "ology" in it as "music".
Indian musicology and musical philosophy, Sufic musical training and thinking, have a fundamentally different approach and feel to Western academic commentary. But all approaches are indicative of the value, mystery and power which music has in our lives. How ironic that so many words are used to describe the act of music; or perhaps, following Christopher Small, the act of musicking. If "God Is A Verb" (Rabbi David A. Cooper, my reading with ProjeKct Two in Montreal and now sitting under Scruton on the basement desk here at Chez Belewbeloid) then maybe "Music Is A Verb" too.
And there's always "How To Get Started In The Music Business" for another approach to The Life In Music.
R. Chris Murphy, sonic constructivist, has arrived in Nashville. At this moment (22.04) Trey Gunn should be landing from Seattle and joining Chris at their hotel.
Words enough for tonight.
"A discipline that does not lead to a compassionate practice may be said to have failed."
