Eclectopia Blog

No one ever teaches us how to manage and operate the wonderous gift that is our body. We inhabit it in total ignorance and often are fighting against the natural grace and beauty of this "amazing design."

But all is not lost. We can stop getting in the way of the body and "support the intention of the original design."

Meeting Sandra was one of the best things about the all-too-brief Guitar Craft session held in Snowshoe, WV. Unlike the intense, "sweating bullets" guitar sessions with master Fripp, Sandra's gentle instruction about the Alexander Technique was an island of tranquility.

Sandra has a free podcast about the Alexander Technique as it relates to other mind-body disciplines. Listen here. 

On Tuesday, Philip Glass turned 75. I did a mini-tribute on the air, but nothing on the blog.

This is a terrific interview (an excerpt) that is for all students, composers and listeners of music. Philip Glass gives us an insight into the compositional process that is simply invaluable.

Paraphrasing Glass, I used to tell my guitar students: "If you don't have a technique, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents." I encouraged them to listen to this interview, but most didn't. Youth has its own blind arrogrance. For me, this interview opened my mind and inspired my own creativity.

A nice story as well. I love that he had installed special windows in his townhouse to create "an oasis of tranquility."

There's a lot that can be going on around a composer while they work, but working in sound demands an exterior absence of sound so that the "inner ear" can be filled with the composer's own sounds.

 Happy (belated) birthday to an inspiring man.

I've got something to crow about.

Crowing about yourself is not considered good form, but to pass by the milestone of ten years of EclecTopia being on the air seems wrong.

The story of how this all came to be reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's quote: "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."

Back in 1998, I was hired part-time to fill in on Sunday night. The story (a series of accidents) goes like this: A UC colleague of mine was offered the job first and despite his insistence to our then program director that he was interested, he confided in me that he didn't want the job. I don't think the gig was high profile enough for him. He told me to apply. 

At first, all I did was "babysit" the sleepy Sunday night programs and came on the air in short spurts when programs changed. In this early stage, I learned to operate the board, calm down enough to speak confidently and slowly develop my own on air style.

Then, program changes left some gaps. Realizing that they had an awkward gap to fill (one program was 1.5 hours long), they let me try my hand at "programming" music. This was a foreign term to me as I was a musician. What was programming? Don't you just play what you feel? 

Not really. Radio is not performing in that, in most cases, listeners do what is called "passive" listening. They listen to the radio as they do other things.

After a while of fumbling in the dark, I found a style that reflected something that was unique. The show needed a new name to go along with this new style and after getting virtually every one of my suggestions shot down (people are not as open-minded as you would think), I decided that I needed to make up a word that reflected the show's eclectic style.

In 2002, EclecTopia found a name, a style and a distinct voice in our lineup. In public, it is appropriate to be modest about one's accomplishments. However, in private, I am fiercely proud of my show which I feel burns brightly, holding its own against national and local shows. It's all killer and no filler.

So, happy decade to EclecTopia.

Shenandoah Conservatory Jazz Ensemble will present Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012 at 8 p.m. in Armstrong Concert Hall on the campus of Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va. Ticket prices are $10 for adults, $9 for seniors and $5 for students and active military. For more information or to purchase tickets, contact the Shenandoah University Box Office at 540-665-4569 or visit www.conservatoryperforms.org. Group discounts are available for groups of 20 or more. 

“Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.” ~ John Cage

It's important to act with intention and to know, in concrete terms, what we are doing and why we are doing it. It is also important to stop and look about us at a universe that is filled with beauty and wonder.

People may scoff at that last statement and call that naive or day dreaming. After all, the arts are not about the practical, sensible or the tangible. So, why should we bother with them?

To me, all the arts have essentially the same purpose: to awaken us to a renewed sense of ourselves and our collective humanity. They also free the imagination from the constraints of the daily grind.

I especially like the visual arts because constantly dwelling on music (speaking both as musician and listener) can make things go stale.

Here are some links to some really incredible artists:

Shinichi Maruyama 

Bill Grey Photography 
Naoto Hattori 

Or if we wish to howl with laughter: MOBA 

There are a million reasons why you might do something.

There are a million reasons why you shouldn't.

Should I write a song? A symphony? 

Should I write a short story? A Poem? 

What if it's not good enough? After all, [insert name of genius here] had written their famous and incredible work at the age of [insert a very young age here]. I'm not good after all. I shouldn't try. 

In the world of the arts, one of the great mysterious entities, as noted in the last blog entry, is creativity. One of the greatest obstacles to creativity is ourselves. Or, sadly, other people.

Sometimes when I'm writing a piece of music or practicing the guitar, my inner voice of doubt, criticism and negativity can start to hamper progress. I noticed this process going on last week when I was trying to get my guitar chops back up to a decent level after the Christmas chaos was over. I was doing simple repetitive finger exercises designed for dexterity. All sorts of negative thoughts were going on in my mind as I tried to get the rust off my fingers. I realized this, stopped judging myself and continued ahead until the work was complete. 

If you think that negativity has no real effect, then listen to my interview with Glenn Kurtz, who quit the guitar for a decade because his voice of doubt drowned out reason. He told me that, "Nothing ever felt good enough."

I know many people to whom I would not go for creative advice or criticism. I can see them politely (and silently) dismissing my music or writing because it will not measure up to the tried-and-true masters. These people, though knowledgable, probably have no creative life because of those unrealistic attitudes. In order to create, we first must be free of judgment. We cannot write symphonic music with the ghost of Beethoven hovering over our workspace.

Craft will then guide us, shaping unformed ideas or discarding weak ones. It is a process: nothing more, nothing less.

In any creative life, craft, technique, knowledge and inspiration are the tools. Discipline is the vehicle which makes all these things possible, but the underlying sustaining element of all these things is very simple: love. If love is not the basis of your creative life, then your creative life will not be able to be sustained. Sheer force of will, or worse, egotism, are frail and faulty. If you do not truly love music (or your chosen creative field), then you will come to despair and maybe quit all together.

In his autobiography, Carl Jung remarked: " St. Paul wrote 'Love bears all things, endures all things.' These words say all there is to be said. There is nothing to be added to them."

To my point: be fully alive in your creativity.  

"The young Sidney Smith (author) was profoundly moved seeing KC live with Jamie Muir at Newcastle Odeon in 1972. Sid’s experiencing belongs in the world of value, the qualitative domain, which is invisible. So how to explain one in terms of the other? Simply, it can’t be done. It is impossible to describe and define the creative act in terms of doing things, although things are done."

That's an excerpt from Robert Fripp's diary that comments on a recent three day long interview (dubbed "interrogation" by Fripp) conducted by Smith for his reissue of his book In the Court of King Crimson. Smith is probably, like many King Crimson fans, searching for a way to quantify through words the experience of an exhilarating musical performance and thus to understand the larger forces of creativity that make up this unique band's catalog.  

In the end, words can come close, but ultimately cannot truly capture what we see, hear and feel during an exceptional live concert. It is not even a purely emotional experience, but rather one that seeks and satisfies all the tools of perception available to us. The aftermath and subsequent processing of the experience begins to gnaw at music lovers until questions of "Why?" and "How?" begin to emerge.

We so crave this elusive experience that we begin to collect; that is to say, we try to possess it. Deluxe reissue, remastered boxsets of popular albums are now so common and, to me, are shamelessly commercially motivated. Pink Floyd has released a six disc "Immersion" boxset of Dark Side of the Moon. When Jimmy Fallon had Floyd drummer Nick Mason on his show, he pulled out a velvet bag containing three marbles with the Dark Side logo on them and then said, "I'm confused." Mason seemed a little nonplussed himself.

Yeah, me too.

Fripp goes on to write: "It is, and has been, very difficult to discuss in interviews with the music press why KC/RF has done whatever it/he has done: because the power in KC does not come from a professional skill-set and a reasonable assessment of musical possibilities, however useful and necessary these might be. And all taking place within a defined cultural context, with particular participants, in a geographical place, at a certain period in time, mediated by agents of commerce."

Creativity and the resultant music then, comes from things both practical and known and from things unknown-even by the players/writers themselves.

So, to conclude, gentle readers, it's OK to buy remastered albums when you have top quality audio equipment to fully appreciate the sonic glory, but boxsets are not time machines bringing us back our lost youth. Neither do they fully reveal the mystery of music.

Creativity is, after all, simply outside the box.