music doesn’t need to require active engaged listening in order for it to have merit, there is joy in leaving something on in the background while completing other tasks
while on the other hand, we can all benefit from actively listening to the # menial sounds that surround our day to day. does your personal acoustic ecology have a noticeable noise floor? what about a noticeable pitch?
it’s almost as if the recorded sound media is incredible because it allows us to *choose* whether to engage with it directly or allow it just to exist in our surroundings while we go about our day
versus our personal soundscapes are in fact live, chance-based performances that will never repeat themselves exactly the same but only exist as a continuously amorphous texture sonically illustrating our immediate surroundings
we can surely benefit from tuning in to this amorphous sonic texture on a musical level, i for one have found the continuous sound of the nearby highway, which has surrounded my personal soundscape wherever i seem to live, as my “come to drone” moment at a young age
has a non-musical entity in your personal day-to-day soundscape ever consciously influenced your day-to-day musical practice? if not, could you see it being beneficial down the line, even in the pop setting?
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it’s truly important to always k*ll yr idols to some extent. it’s weird when you come to the point in your artistic career or whatever you wanna call it and you realize half the shit youve learned to do right was through seeing horrible mentors do it wrong.
case in point my high school music teacher taught me exactly how not to foster creativity in a young artist aspiring to get their foot in the door of higher music education
i never did well in music theory class in high school, i ironically failed AP theory one semester cuz i often skipped class to go to auditions and testing programs for music composition bachelors programs
critical music education is the music teacher holding a mirror up to themselves and asking the question “am i being aesthetically dictatorial?”
a music teacher should never allow their aesthetic biases to become the basis for the concepts they are teaching. we can talk about four part harmony without focusing solely on baroque, just like we can talk improvisation without focusing solely on jazz.
it’s almost expected that the conservatory setting will be dictatorial to some extent, the job is to “conserve” “art” music, and in the western world that means almost exclusively concert music from the 1500s-1800s