Loren wrote:Wormdiet wrote:
I wasn't suggesting that we refrain from talking about music - merely that there are some reasons why people don't.
The people who do not have teachers (myself included) find a lot of value in this place. But I'd trade it for a first-rate teacher if I had the opportunity.
Well, I think it's more of the same problem though, you end up with people of a very wide variety of skill levels contributing advice, and for the most part you have no way to sort the wheat from the chaff, having never heard most of the would be advice givers play.
Loren
Ah, but Grasshopper -- that's the nature of the beast. And even if we all could hear everyone play, who's to say we'd all judge each others' playing the same way? If I had just started out on the flute and heard you play Morrison's with a few ornaments at something even close to session speed, I might think you were Mike McGoldrick.
By the same token, if you heard me play, you might think I was ... well, chud.
OK, bad analogy.
But a neat story from Mr. S. comes to mind here ... he was playing at some flute concert or festival or other in Brittany, I think, and the player who was onstage before him pulled out all the pyrotechnic stops. Inventive playing, lots of fireworks, great improvisation, brilliant without question. The crowd went wild.
So jeez, how's John supposed to follow that?
He revised his game plan, and went out and played an air as simply as he could.
Now, I'm sure there were many in the crowd who thought "Eh????? This world-class guy plays something so simple?"
But I bet there were a fair number who said "Ahhh. Nice cut there, that one cut he used on the A, perfectly placed, never thought of that."
And I bet there were a few who said "Holy ____. What a great idea to do that, what a lovely reading of that tune and good on him for helping build an even nicer overall concert than it was already. Freaking genius."
It's only my opinion, but I would venture that the last bunch were the ones who'd been hard at the music mill a very long time.
My point is, people respond to things differently not just because of personal taste, but also depending on what stage of learning/knowledge/familiarity they happen to be in.
It's so easy to want to pigeonhole things and apply standards to processes, but hey, mistakes and wrong turns are part of the journey too. If people are going to be good players, they'll do whatever it takes to become good players -- whether it's talking about it, playing for hours a day, thinking about it all the time, listening all the time, taking good advice, taking not-so-good advice, ignoring really good advice or not working on what the good players told them to try, OR, not being in a place to even hear or understand the good advice, or all of the above at some point or other. But basically, we're going to spend a fairly significant amount of time being not-so-great players; some of us more time than others -- what that time consists of will be what it will be.
But it's not hurting anything, the only thing it costs is time -- and besides. If being brilliant is all about learning from your mistakes, maybe it's a case of the more wrong turns the merrier!
(I should be a regular Einstein by now
)
After all, the less I know, the more I can learn.
Deja Fu: The sense that somewhere, somehow, you've been kicked in the head exactly like this before.