Bringing Intelligence To Your Practice

So how is it that a person trained as a musician finds herself delving into hard science on the road of developing musicianship?

I was at a loss.

I'd grown up musically along the conveyor belt approach to teaching music applied through the public school system and had all but lost hope that I would ever be a good musician.

And then I lost hope.

Losing it was the best thing that ever happened to me as it allowed me to let go of the garbage that I'd picked up along the conveyor belt. With nothing else to lose I could explore anything without fear. In fact, I could do anything without fear. I no longer cared if I ever made music again.

I wanted to discover how it was that musicians made music - not from a teacher who'd pass down his thoughts along with his fear but from a biological perspective - sans emotion - remove history - remove all the trappings of lineage and delve into the mechanics of the thing from a position of neutrality.

This was a sharp turn for me personally and musically as I'd never been one to run into the arms of science as a means for understanding anything. I'd always positioned myself as a staunch intuitionist and laid myself at the mercy of emotion - feeling - in every aspect of my life including and beyond music. I'd come to realize that this posture was standing in my way and that I needed to give it up in order to move on.

The first science I consciously was explored cognitive science. I was intriqued by the notion that there were people who made it their business to understand how human beings understand things. I arrived at cognitive science after a couple of years stumbling through linguistics and lexiconology after discovering the work of a man who would become one of my heros - Roland Barthes.

I was elated when I ran into cogsci - it was liberating to know that someone somewhere thought it was important to understand how people do things in order to build better tools for humans. This type of thinking seemed sorely absent from all of my musical studies where people seemed to relish the difficult and hope to thrive in asphyxiation in the name of "virtuosity".

By contemplating *how* I believed that I could begin to re-approach my musical practice and bring to it simple intelligence that was based on the way that *any* human being understood music from a cognitive perspective and with a mastery of music from that place eventually re-address the topics of style and artistic aesthetic.

There was another component that motivated my study and that was to find out more about the cognitive perspective of an audience member. So often in my music studies had I remarked to myself that there was a glaring ommission in our discussions - how does this music impact the people listening to it and shouldn't that be taken a large factor in the creation of music?

Nothing - Nada - Zilch.

4 years of composition and arranging studies in college and only *1* teacher mentioned the topic and he was a visiting artist doing a residency.

Shift And Refocus

After much consideration (over one year's worth), I've decided to refocus this blog. The original subject was posted as "Writing devoted to the concepts of audiation, auditory perception, studies and research in cognitive science, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and biomechanics. How do people use their minds, bodies and souls to make music?"

While I see a great deal of value in the pursuit of answers to the question posed and the subjects chosen for investigation I realize that they are secondary to a larger issue - the development of "musicianship".

I stumbled across my chosen subjects on the road to becoming the musician that I want to be. I asked questions and found interesting answers (and more questions) through the process. Over time however, the relevance of my questions shifts. As answers arise and new realizations manifest my comprehension of the questions themselves changes.

Perhaps this is a complex way of stating that I've changed my mind and thus have decided to refocus this blog.