Making music to throw away
I’m back!
Tour is over. It went great; it beat all our expectations. You can see a few pics on my Instagram if you’re curious!
I thought that I would ease us back into action with a couple of guest posts. A couple of you wrote a couple of things that I thought would be worth sharing.
The first one is courtesy of our dear friend Sean Bradley — a wildly talented violinist / conductor / concertmaster / music contractor living and working in Los Angeles. Here’s something Sean had to say the other day on his Instagram, which I found so inspiring:
Every day, I try to cook up one minute of (essentially) improvised music ... and then throw it away.
I lived for two years with an 80-year-old Dutch protégé of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the inventor of Eurythmics. No — not the Annie Lennox / Dave Stewart synthpop collab. The original Eurythmics: a system of learning about music through movement, that ultimately influenced Carl Orff's methodology. (Orff composed the Carmina Burana of Conan the Barbarian soundtrack fame, but was also a noted teacher.)
This elderly friend of mine was a Zen Buddhist, and formerly taught dance at Julliard, but was also the widow of a very famous Dutch portrait artist.
I lived in her deceased husband's studio, surrounded by his excellent artwork. Two of his paintings I remember well: a life-size self-portrait of himself as a man about my age now, painting himself. That powerful stern-faced work stared me in the eyes every day in the drafty high-ceilinged studio. And: a very tasteful reclining nude of his girlfriend whom he painted at the time he was 21. She was very beautiful and you could feel the love.
He escaped the Nazis with his Jewish girlfriend by building a sailboat ... with which they absconded to the U.S.
He died of Lou Gehrig's disease ... and never told his (later) dancer wife that he loved her ... even though she cared for him in a vegetative state for the final 14 years of his life. But, prior to getting sick, he painted her quite a lot, too.
They often performed together — he on guitar, she singing — during a famous (at the time) series of rooftop concerts in post-war LA.
She told me: every day he'd get up, go to the studio, paint for about 10 minutes — and then throw away what he painted. Only after this improvisatory period of painterly play would he begin the disciplined work of whatever masterpiece he was deliberately executing. He used the 10 minutes to warm up his brush hand, to work through ideas ... to play and explore. Once in a while, he might've developed an idea.
I use the goal of improvising one minute of music a day to keep my imagination active. Likewise: to play and explore.
Over a year, I compose and discard five to six hours of music.
What an excellent practice. I love the idea of abundance embodied in here. I love the idea that we don’t need to be precious about our work. And I most love the idea that the best way to ensure that we don’t run out of creative ideas is to keep having them, in as intentional a way as possible. Art not as divine inspiration, but as practice.
Thanks Sean — jamie