Why must musicians explore disciplines outside of music?

“However, growing experience in a domain does not necessarily result in improved performance. Up to a certain point, growing experience contributes to improved performance. Beyond some level, however, performance may actually decline as expertise continues to rise. The decline in the performance may stem from the fact that highly expert individuals who have extremely well-developed cognitive frameworks, rely increasingly on them and on relatively automatic modes of thought. As a result the performance declines.
They can become “locked in” by their own cognitive frameworks (eg: prototypes) if these become too strong or well-established.”

— Baron 2006 (http://bit.ly/goodexemplarsofmusic)

To be future-proof, one of the must-have skills that we need to work on is cross-pollinating ideas across disciplines. This idea is expressed in the book, The Spark by using Cirque De Soleil as an example.

One of the aspects to Cirque's extraordinary freshness and vitality is how the artists cross-pollinate ideas from outside influences such as painting, film, and music. Many great artists get inspired by ideas and events totally unrelated to their chosen field. Cutting off from outside interests may limit our thinking. To accomplish this, Cirque deliberately teams up people from different backgrounds with different personalities to come up with something original.

A good starting point would be to take other people's ideas and run with them.  

“The worst thing someone can do to me is give me a blank white page and say, ‘Create something.’ I don’t understand people who say, ‘it’s not my job to be creative.’ Well, then, you’re selling your job short!. Your job is what you make it.”

The below excerpt from the book illustrates the idea of cross-pollination in music. 

“As the show began, I was struck by the music, a fusion of vastly different styles, from Argentine drumming to Opera. Johann had told me about it the day before. ‘When creating the music, the composer found it challenging to bring the theme of urban life to the score. So he imagined what it would sound like if he drove his car through a city like New York with the windows rolled down; he would hear everything from rock to African to classical music. And that’s what he tried to capture, the diverse sounds of urban life in a cosmopolitan city.’”

Turning these random ideas into art requires focus and one way to achieve that would be deadlines. Limitations in terms of time and resources can be a good thing as the panicked mind starts coming up with crazy ideas it would never have otherwise. 

However, in an organizational setting, as more layers of hierarchy adds up, new rules will get in the way of creativity. When there are too many restrictions, they deaden the magic, and you start thinking about what you cannot do instead of what you can do. 

The author leaves us with some food for thought. 

“Picasso did not ask for approval from the legal department before he started painting Guernica.”

If you find any value this blog post, share this post with any ten people you care about. Subscribe to the mailing list below. 

*Email Address

Website

The consolation of music

Musician, Peter Gabriel in his conversation with Alain de Botton makes a case for music as a consolation and solace to our daily troubles. He also, talks about his new project called the Interspecies internet and how apes can understand, listen, and play music as much as humans do. Below are some of the highlights of this talk. 

We make music for a number of reasons from finding a mate to seeking retreat. Compared to other forms of communication that goes through several filters in our bodily systems, music is a sort of quicker release but, it may not be as precise a weapon as a word. A collection of music is like a box of pills, certain songs delivering certain emotional functions, they may be to calm you down, to comfort you, to excite you.

There’s an area of emotional map that hasn’t been covered and you try to create a song for that. Music can be like an axe in a frozen sea which is equipped from nature. We lock away a lot of ourselves and there are a lot of instruments that finally break them open. 

Fear is a big element and is often, undervalued. Bravery is the flip side of fear, fear well-channelled. I am a musician and I pretty much got away doing anything calling what I do as work. That’s probably getting a little more comfortable in dealing with your fears.  

The below quote from the interview reinforces the argument that nothing is original and everything is a remix in music. 

“You really want to be wide open, wide awake and able to be borrow, steal, absorb anything that interests you. We must be like dogs in the park. You sniff something interesting and you jump on it.”

I must also, add that in Indian Carnatic music most of the lyrical elements are based on Hindu gods, religion, and philosophy (something similar to the gospels in Christianity), the crux of the theme being consolation and therapy to the wounded clueless soul. Peter says something similar on these lines as follows: 

“Songs offer solace and caters to the vulnerability of the listeners and lends an imaginary helping hand. The song ‘Don’t give up’ has literally saved people from jumping off the roof. It seems to be offering hope when there is little.”

— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjEq-r2agqc

He goes on to describe about this new project, Interspecies internet. 

“I have always been fascinated by inter-species communication on our planet. My project, inter-species internet is an attempt to try and allow other species to explore and make use of internet and other tools and see how they are making use of it. This project includes Neil Gershenfeld, one of the founders of the internet and according to him we are going to be aliens someday and if we don’t practice learning to communicate with other species, we are starting at a disadvantage. It starts with music, because music is a universal language.”

Watch his fascinating conversation with Alain here. 

The great musician Peter Gabriel came to do an event around the corner from the School of Life's London HQ: a discussion on music, philosophy, science, therapy and... apes.

Also, read what's music for and why musicians are also, sometimes therapists. 

If you find any value in this blog post, share this post with any ten people you care about. You can subscribe to the mailing list below. 

*Email Address

Website

The creative constraints of a mixtape

Lately, most of my music listening has been about ‘discovering’ songs in multitudes. Every day I come across something new and this instant novelty of discovering new songs ruins the joy of repetitive listening and understanding the nuances of a song. 

That’s when I came across this beautiful article on Medium by Dan Dalton and it gave me ideas to form my own mix tape, if not weekly at least a monthly one, for more slow and repetitive listening. If you are a minimalist like me, you might want to consider this idea.  

“Art consists in limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
”

— G. K. Chesterton

Dan says that one of the beautiful aspects of a mixtape is that it has a limit. And, it’s this limit that makes it all the more special. After all, we are hardwired to understand stories and scarcity and we value scarce resources more. 

“I’m a story teller. It’s how I make sense of the world. I need a narrative. To do that I need limits. A creative constraint. I limit my playlists to ten songs. You could fit many more than that on two sides of tape––depending on the tape — and almost double that on a CD. But ten songs is enough to tell story without losing the listener. On average I end up with around 40 minutes of music; a focused, cohesive collection spun around a single theme. The tracks aren’t always killer — that’s often not the point — but it means they aren’t filler either. It’s about finding the right ten songs. Putting them in the right order. That’s the joy, other than the listening. The challenge of it. Like putting the right words in a sentence.”

— http://tinyletter.com/mixtape

“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem.”

— Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

“At some level, music is often the soundtrack for something else.People pay a premium for a story, every time.”

— Seth Godin

He further adds that even in today’s world of predictive analytics and computer-generated suggestions, the act of human curation is more relevant than ever.

“It pays to be obsessive about how songs segue into each other. To think about the story you’re telling. This is why making playlists by hand will always beat out an algorithm. As good as they are, algorithms lack nuance, they can find similar songs, match tempo, but they have limits. They suck at making left field choices.”

“A good curator is thinking not just about acquisition and selection, but also contextualizing.”

— Joanne McNeil

“Ideas are the most valuable thing. Good ones make all the difference; bad ones can hold us back, maybe even destroy us. If we can focus on finding the right ones, helping distill them, and transfer them as quickly as possible, we can get more of that. Curation is that means to the end.”

— Peter Hopkins

Here are some tips that can help you curate your own mixtape.

“The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”

— Dan Dalton

“The mix tape is a list a quotations, a poetic form in fact: the cento is a poem made up of lines pulled from other poems. The new poet collects and remixes.
”

— Matias Viegener, Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture

Could this mean that we may have to delete some of the music from our not-so-regularly-heard collection? It is a painful heartbreaking process, I know. This article by The Minimalists might help. 

Also, do check this mixtape I created on my SoundCloud page. 

[UPDATE 1]

The reason we love live gigs and concerts is because of the constraint induced by time. We love tight deadlines and that's a reason we love football games, quarterly reviews, and SMART goals in organizations. Deadlines are a creative constraint and they induce a sense of meaning to things we do. Without a compressed time scale, we might lose the thread of the whole story as it becomes tough to stay motivated for long.

[UPDATE 2]

Existentially, boredom as a result of introducing constraints is probably the most promising gateway to happiness. It's an antidote to the ever distracting digital life we are living nowadays. From my personal experience, I can vouch for this fact since the most resourceful/liberating period in my life was when I took a break from full-time work and moved to the US and spent 4 years of my time working as a pro bono consultant and blogger. There were several constraints in my life at that point - visa limitations, vehicle, and money. 

This counter intuitive idea could be one of the reasons we miss our childhoods and we tend to get nostalgic about it. Childhood is a time when a person experiences the most number of constraints since we had to seek permission from the adults. Constraints in terms of money, activities, socializing, and screen time only makes a child more resourceful in finding a solution to his or her boredom. And, that is the true cure to existential emptiness. 

No thinker in the history of humanity has talked about this topic than Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. 

“A solitary prisoner for life is extremely resourceful; to him a spider can be a source of great amusement… What a meticulous observer one becomes, detecting every little sound or movement. Here is the extreme boundary of that principle that seeks relief not through extensity but through intensity.
The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

Not only in life but also, in music, it's the constraint introduced by the seven notes that makes music so interesting, complex, and beyond mankind. In Carnatic music, the Neraval in Manodharma Sangeetham uses this idea where the singer improvises the piece using just two or three phrases. 

If you find any value in this blog post, consider subscribing to the mailing list below. 

*Email Address

Website

The rise of 'nichebusters'

Chris Anderson, in his book, The Long Tail, introduces us to this idea of how nichebusters has replaced the earlier blockbusters in the digital world. In this blog post, I am sharing some thoughts from the book that contributed to this relatively recent phenomenon and its consequences.

The rise in demand for obscure products (including books, music, films, etc.) is a result of infinite shelf space with real-time information on buying trends and public opinion. While 20th-century entertainment industry was all about 'hits', the 21st century will be about niches. There are fewer events, now, that capture the communal pop culture spirit. Because of this, we are no longer defined by our geography but, by our interests. The book says that:

Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution. The web simply unified the elements of a supply-chain revolution that had been brewing for decades.

Also,

Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure. Popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

This shift in demand towards niches will make the economics of providing them further improve. This feedback loop will transform industries and culture forever resulting in the mainstreaming of the niche. It may give rise to a new kind of 'hits'.
This phenomenon called long tail is just:

culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.

From the consumers' point of view, over time as the audience wandered farther away from the beaten path, they began to realize that their taste is not as mainstream as they thought and started exploring the unknown together.

Young people don't want to rely on a Godlike figure to tell them what's important. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.

And, collectively, our tastes are far more diverse than the marketing plans being fired at us. One person's noise could be another person's signal and one country's hits could be another country's niche.

The individuals haven't changed; they've always been fragmented. What's changing is their media habits. They're now simply satisfying the fragmented interests that they've always had. There are as many fragments as there are individuals. Always have been and always will be.
It shows that my tribe is not always your tribe, even if we work together, play together, and otherwise live in the same world. Same bed, different dreams.

From a consumer perspective, human attention is more expandable than money. Therefore, even though we may consume more of 'non-rivalrous attention seeking' media (those in the 'want' markets) such as music we may not necessarily pay a lot more for the privilege. This is something musicians need to keep in mind while building a business model around their craft. 

As a result of an abundance of niches and sub-niches, there arise a need for specialization. That said, we might be mainstream in some areas of life but, we go behind niches in some others. For instance, I am quite mainstream when it comes to watching movies whereas when it comes to listening to music, reading, and values I go behind niche ideas.

Despite all this, our assumptions about media have not changed. Many existing media firms are still oriented toward funding, and creating blockbusters. We still give disproportionate attention to the very top of the heap, from superstars to CEOs. This is because we have been trained to see the world through a hit-colored lens.  

What does this mean in the big picture? As much as these changes offer us endless possibilities, there are definitely some trade-offs that we should be aware of. Here's what the author thinks: 

Are we promoting a creative individualism or a narrow individualism? By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of tastes, but the numbing repetition of fetish. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.
Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views, I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.

If you find any value in this blog post, subscribe to the mailing list below:

*Email Address

Website

What’s music for and why music theory is important?

Whether releasing sadness or sending shivers down our spines, the songs in our ‘emotional toolbox’ can transform daily life … if we learn how to use them.

 Alain de Botton, one of my favorite writers, comes up with his wisdom on the point of music in this article published by Guardian. He argues that the theoretical role of music can enhance our capacity to appreciate music. 

Musicians themselves have tended to reinforce such an approach, rarely venturing to supply an additional prose commentary around what their chords are already communicating. Yet a clearer handle on the theoretical role of music may at times enhance rather than impoverish our capacity to appreciate music. Knowing what music does for us can give us a sharper sense of which of its varieties we might be in particular need of, why and when.

He uses the example of Peter Gabriel’s music to make his point clear. 

What seems especially striking are his repeated pronouncements that music should, to quote his distinctive formulation, provide us with “an emotional toolbox” to which we can turn at different moments of our lives, locating songs to recover, guide and sublimate our feelings.

One of Peter’s songs, I Grieve, a standard at many funeral services, 

knows how to release our sadness and yet also channels and contains it. It creates perfect conditions for a catharsis. It starts with what sounds pure lamentation. The tone is utterly dejected.

Even though we may know these things in theory, we need reminders in the form of songs to turn cliches into an effective call for redemption. 

Music is so necessary because it rehearses in the language of the body concepts and truths we are in danger of losing touch with when they reach us only through our rational faculties. Music is “the sensuous presentation of the crucial ideas”. There is a role for music in opening up channels of feeling that have become dammed by habit, caution, excessive individualism, or the demands of daily life.

He uses Nietzsche’s teachings to emphasize this point. 

We need to be thoughtful and sober, yet open to the instinctive and the irrational – and it is by combining these two ideals that we stumble towards maturity. This is why music and dance have such importance for Nietzsche (“Without music, life would be a mistake”); they provide us with a setting in which the neglected parts of our personalities can be rediscovered and reconciled. The ‘shiver down the spine’ we feel at points in music are encounters with our suppressed longings for forgiveness, reconciliation and harmony – returning to us with an alienated majesty. The great musicians stock our emotional toolboxes with what we most need to endure life’s journey. Though they don’t always say it themselves, they are in the very best sense the therapists of our souls.

Whoever said that ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it is a stupid thing to do’ might want to rethink. 

Also, check out what art is for and how musicians are also, therapists.

[UPDATE]

This article resonates deeply with Sou's Voice blog's philosophy and explains the connection between language and music. 

“The springs of our reaction to music lie deeper than thought. Language and music co-evolved to simulate the most abiding truths of nature. We’ve made music about the most inarticulable parts of it and then used language to extol music’s power. Music’s greatest potency lies in expressing the inexpressible. This, perhaps, is why music is so sublime a solace when it comes to the most inexpressible of human emotions: grief. Music bypasses the intellect and speaks straight to the unguarded heart. ”

“Part of what music allows me is the freedom to drift off into a reverie of my own, stimulated but not constrained by the inventions of the composer. And part of what I love about music is the way it relaxes the usual need to understand. Sometimes the pleasure of an artwork comes from not knowing, not understanding, not recognizing.”

— Wendy Lesser

Also, check out a related blog post on why make art out of pain.

If you see any value in this blog post, consider subscribing to the weekly newsletter/mailing list below. 

*Email Address

Website