Paul Cantrell
Re this from @jasonkoebler, two things:
First, as a pianist and composer who fights tooth and nail to keep his music alive through the maelstrom of life, despite zero (or negative) economic benefit, I’d just like my “fuck you, Mikey Shulman” on the record. Thanks.
Paul Cantrell
Second, “enjoy” is the wrong word. Capitalist techbro just can’t imagine music having any purpose other than pleasure or consumption, to be maximized (obviously).
People create music/art because the creative process gives them life — even when that process is frustrating, laborious, maddening, or just •hard work•.
And people enjoy engaging deeply with it because of that sense that it has a creator and the creation process gave that person life, life they can now share in experiencing that art.
2/
Paul Cantrell
My legendary mentor Don Betts said, “Music teaches us how to think and feel.”
Note: not •what• to think and feel. •How.•
Gen AI is probably just fine for pumping out endless office lobby music whose purpose is to be neutral and generic, to be ignored. But what Don said? No way. The mere output isn’t the point. You’ve got to live it.
3/
Advanced Persistent Teapot
@inthehands @jasonkoebler I would like to second, third, fourth, and especially, diminished fifth this
Paul Cantrell
Music (and all forms of art) aren't just self-therapy — though they are that, to be sure. They’re instruction manual and mutual support and medicine and nourishment for being a thinking and feeling human being. Being a person is a •lot•! Music helps us be this messy, beautiful thing that we are.
And it’s something else, too.
4/
Paul Cantrell
@http_error_418 @jasonkoebler I’ll augment that.
Paul Cantrell
We live in a world of breathtaking beauty. That beauty is not just inhabited by life; it is •created• by life. It’s created by all these living organisms just being what they are, shaping the world by living in it.
Trees make forests. Coral makes reefs. Humans make art.
Other things too, yes. But all our creative work is surely one of the things at the center of what we bring to the universe — precious and valuable the way flowers or anthills are precious and valuable.
5/
Paul Cantrell
If there’s any •purpose• to living things, if our existence is •for• anything, surely creating music is part of that purpose. Not just outputting music; living it, breathing it, struggling with it and through it, experiencing it fully as both creator and listener. Our purpose.
And if this extractive capitalism of our current world is good for anything, it’s killing purpose, reducing everything to an empty husk. So to be clear, I’m not just saying “fuck you, Mikey Shulman, you cheapen my work as a musician;” I’m saying “fuck you, Mikey Shulman, you’re trying to destroying what gives our human existence meaning.” •That• kind of a fuck you.
/end
Paul Cantrell
Yes. Both market economics and policing of artistic hierarchy make us forget that the point isn’t to be the •best• at it; the point is to •do• it.
People don’t always play music to win or to profit or to pass their juries. People play to •play•. That piano rep we quarantine in concert halls nowadays is supposed to be for the home — and primarily for the enjoyment of the player, whether perfecting it or just fumbling through it. (Somebody called the piano “the big-screen TV of the 19th century.”)
Keep playing, @jredlund.
Jen
@inthehands @jasonkoebler being part of a community orchestra gives me so much.
I can immerse myself in a community based on a shared interest. I collaborate and connect with them in a way that trandcends language. I can focus on a skill that isn't about survival, but about joy. I get to be competent at one of the few things long covid hasn't stolen from me. It gives me self-worth and self-confidence when both are suffering.
And this is just a tiny slice of my experience of music.
Paul Cantrell
Yes, @JetlagJen centers something I’d only alluded to: creation is connection; creation is community. That’s a crucial part of this too. A whole where all art is automatically generated is an unimaginably lonely world.
Paul Cantrell
And an addendum, just in case it’s not clear:
I’m talking about music, but I see all of the above in people perfecting their cookie recipe, or working out a mathematical proof, or writing fanfic, or lovingly patching a torn garment. All creative work.
What I said about the piano as the center of the home is in the past, but that creative instinct — so quintessentially human — is alive and well. Yes, even today.
Paul Cantrell
Yes. Then extend this to the whole universe, seeing us as a part of it, and you’ve got the idea of my thread.
Bleistifterin
@inthehands @jasonkoebler I don' t remember the exact quote or where she said it, but Dorothy Sayers wrote somewhere that God created Us in his image, and thus as creative and creating beings. Always loved this and feel it is correct on an almost instinctive level
Rufus J. Cooter
@inthehands Yes to this whole thread!
STG, these chuds would build a robot that can do a kickflip on a skateboard, then bring it down to the park and be like, "isn't this great, kids!? Now you can get rid of your boards! The robot can do kickflips for you!"
Jen
@inthehands All. Creative. Work.
I see it in intricate metalwork dug up after hundreds of years lost. It's in cave paintings, moai statues, and Nascar lines. Creativity in a million guises echoes through the heart of every human who has ever lived.
We can create ever more complex tools to support our creativity, but they can never replace it.
tentative existence
@inthehands Another yes to the whole thread. The time I spend with music has so much going on that has nothing to do with entertaining anyone else. I love to spend time with a piece I'm learning and stop right in the middle and really think about how things work, what's going on in the structure of the music, then going back to playing while trying to stay connected to whatever new awareness I've managed - it's one of the best things I do for myself.
Paul Cantrell
All that! One of the things that’s amazing about being a musician is that there’s a version of the piece that exists in your mind that cannot possibly actually exist as sound. Every performance is a slightly different 2-dimensional snapshot of that 3-dimensional idea.
I think listeners who really, really engage with the music can find this too. But we performers really get the best of it.
Paul Cantrell
@bleistifterin understood!! Just riffing further!
Bleistifterin
@inthehands @jasonkoebler oh I just posted it to agree
sollat
@inthehands
All of those things make your connection to life more visceral. I was thinking just the other day about how learning to play the piano informs how I type, my mental connection to my hands. And how that weirdly connects to learning gymnastics and art and baking.
Paul Cantrell
@sollat
Playing and especially composing are so deeply connected to how I wrote code I feel like they’re half the same thing — and I could talk about that for a thousand hours and never manage to really explain what I mean.
`
This is spot on! I might share a newly written song with a creative friend and I love to gather with likeminded folks and create something together, but I don't release music anymore, neither digitally or physically. And even before the ongoing COVID pandemic I had stopped playing live because for me that isn't an important part of songwriting, and I'm a songwriter, not a performer. I refuse to be commodified or intellectualized, for me art *is* the process of creating. I want to embody and be inspired by that process, not what someone else thinks or how well they enjoy whatever is left behind when I'm finished with the creative act.
Paul Cantrell
@pettylarcen
I also mostly make music for myself. I mostly stopped recording and performing in 2020, have been really missing it, and have been struggling with how to do that in a way that is true to me and my creativity and not bending to fit how the world says I should approach it all. It’s a tough needle to thread! And our current era does not make it easy.
Paul Cantrell
@PaulDavisTheFirst @JetlagJen
I’d say cut yourself some slack. I create a lot of my music using thoroughly pre-computer methods — pen and paper at the piano — and I can assure you that solitary creation has been an ingredient of music since forever. And that solitude can be beautiful.
I’d venture that the isolation artists feel is a product of social systems, not tools. In a functioning society, the solitary creator should still find paths to community.
PaulDavisTheFirst
@inthehands @JetlagJen sadly, creation is not community in the same sense that it once was. As the original author of a cross-platform digital audio workstation, I often feel regret about the extent to which contemporary computer-based msuic/audio tools allow people to work alone.
I believe it to be a real and genuine problem to which I contributed (not the worst problem I've contributed to, however).
1/
alcinnz
@inthehands Funny, you're describing how I enjoy working in tech!
Paul Cantrell
@alcinnz
Don’t want to jump to conclusions, but you might be human
Paul Cantrell
Sure, there is •something• to that. But my love is solo piano music, and the primary way that repertoire has led to social connections throughout history is from people playing in the home or for small groups of friends — and also from learning and teaching it.
I see those same impulses at work in people sharing DAW tips and tricks with each other, getting together to listen to works in progress (which very much happens), etc. The instinct is there. The possibility is there. It’s social support structures — time and slack, first and foremost — that are missing.
There are always avenues for turning a completely solitary creation into a point of human connection in a well-functioning society.
PaulDavisTheFirst
@inthehands @JetlagJen that's not enough to justify slack :) Sure, if you want to write piano sonatas, you worked alone for the last few hundred years.
but if you were a piano player and needed drums, you used to have to find a drummer. now you just need a DAW and maybe a plugin or two.
which is both good and bad: you may live somewhere where there really is no drummer. but you may also be failing to connect with the drummer next door, so to speak.
Paul Cantrell
I see @Gaolaitch is on a related train of thought today:
Rob
@inthehands What a great thread, and well said! While I’m not a musican, the way you describe feeling and living music is perfect. Music has been super-important to me my whole life, in good times and bad. It can make me smile and it can make me cry, and that’s mostly because of the *life* imbued within by the artist. Thank you for writing this.
Paul Cantrell
@coperob
Thank you for listening to music with your whole self!
Ben Judson
@inthehands @Gaolaitch I was reading Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater" recently, and was really struck by how much it speaks to our current moment
Paul Cantrell
Since I mentioned Don Betts upthread, I feel like I should link to something of his. In his later years, 80s and even into 90s, his daughter and grandson helped him make videos of him playing his piano at home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYCRBroUi9E
I think these intimate videos capture more of what this music is supposed to be than the most prestigious commercial release in the world. And they are so very •Don•.
I miss him.
Yeshaya Lazarevich
@inthehands
I can't agree with that due to value system reasons, but I do think that this is a great example why those systems represent a kind of spiritual death. It's interesting to be a witness to what real good old fashioned idolatry (as distinct from paganism, by the way) is doing to humanity.
Paul Cantrell
@alter_kaker
Yeah, I’m not sure I could agree with my own statement truly 100% without far more careful teasing out of nuances than a post allows.
Paul Cantrell
@EpiphanicSynchronicity @JetlagJen
But are you sure?? 😉
https://techhub.social/@daletrexel/113823084511008765
Epiphanic Synchronicity
@JetlagJen @inthehands This is a beautiful thought, but I’m pretty sure you mean *Nazca* lines, not Nascar (probably autocorrect gone rogue):
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