I am running a scientific experiment on myself. I am watching what happens as I begin to compose again without judgement of good or bad on what I write – I just want to watch how this unfolds and to share this unfolding.
I’m toppling writers block, so to do this I need to remove as many barriers as possible. This firstly means removing the barrier of thinking I have to get something out of my improvising. I must annihilate all negativity, doubts, and frustration. I must play and write just for the love of playing and writing. Even though I know there is a result I want, I have to let go of the desire to get to this result. This reads as a paradox, but I think the way to win is to not care if I win.
I’ve been improvising at the piano again now for a few days. I see that my endurance for this has become low and needs to be built up. So I’m improvising a few separate times in the day for short intervals. It’s been clumsy and hard, but I do have a few observations already about how to do this now that I am older and wiser.
One thought that is new to me is that I need to make sure I am improvising musically and play the piano with feeling. I have to listen to sound, mostly the tunes, and play as effectively as possible. I’m not searching for notes, I’m searching for musical line. This search for musical line is exactly what I do when I conduct, and I’m wondering if my conducting will inform my improvising.
I am figuring out a way to get some reasonable recordings of my improvising so that I can post clips what I create here in this blog. This is not a safe idea in that I’ll be posting music that is very rough. That’s bad self promotion. But I’m not looking to show that I have great improvs right now, I am documenting a process of the musical evolution over time.
.
Dan- you’ve made progress from your last blog post. Congratulations! I like your thoughts here. It feels like a good healthy start. One other idea that occurred to me was to listen to other composers that you like, and riff off of their work…everything’s “borrowed”, right? Sending good, creative vibes!
Hello. Thanks for reading and writing in. I am stealing some material. I steal and then aim to assimilate.
d
An interesting dialogue is value comment. I believe that you must write extra on this subject, it might not be a taboo topic however generally individuals are not sufficient to talk on such topics. To the next. Cheers
Thanks for the note. I”ll keep writing – even though I didn’t for awhile. But I did come back. I”m glad you like it and others are writing in as well.
My website is labeling all of my post as unreadable and unacceptable. It seems to want really short entries with pictures. But I’m ignoring it and writing what I want and I’m glad it is helpful.