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Doing Music Differently***Practice***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family***Our Recording***Unspecialized
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Usually it’s assumed performing is the ultimate test of a musician’s accomplishment, and that once one has achieved a certain level of skill the next proper step is to start looking for a venue.
Ever since we started trying to promote our music, folks have been bothering us with questions about why we don’t perform, and often their ( not so friendly ) implication has been if we don’t perform, then we’re not quite real musicians.
But to us this makes as little sense as believing every good cook should focus on finding work as a restaurant chef.
Because for us music is most emphatically not performance, instead it’s something we’ve done by ourselves and for ourselves.
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To take this beyond the merely personal, we can’t help but feel the ( relatively recent ) total takeover of music by performers is one downright tragic aspect of the ongoing shrinkage of the modern human.
To us it’s clear the world was a better place when everyone made music ( using the word broadly to include things like whistling, lullabies, work chants, and shepherds’ piping, as well as playing more official instruments like pianos and violins ), when most music was like ours in the sense it was something folks did to entertain themselves and their close friends.
Indeed for us playing music and performing music not only feel like completely different activities, they’re usually mutually exclusive.
So most of the time, when we perform ( which is never to more than one or two friends sitting in the quiet of our house ), we’re painfully aware we’re not really playing music, but instead we’re just imitating ourselves playing music.
And it doesn’t matter that nowadays we’ve reached a skill level where our imitation can be very convincing to others, because we can’t fool ourselves. We can’t avoid hearing how when performing we’re almost always playing patterns which are familiar, graceful, and safe, and how inevitably this tames and steals the magic from our music.
How different from when we’re alone and not afraid to sound awkward. It’s only then that we can really lose ourselves.
It’s only then that the magic mounts in our music until it draws a hovering crowd of listening gandharvas and angels.
Of course most performers will disagree with this and will instead insist they get inspiration and energy from their audiences, but since our personal experience continues to be that audiences just make us uptight, we do our best to avoid them.
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Other Ways To Share One’s Music
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At this point some unsympathetic readers may impatiently throw up their hands and insist what we’ve been saying is just idealistic nonsense. That in the real world the only way to prove you’re a serious musician is to put your skills on the line and get out there and perform. And that if you don’t, you’re just a “closet musician” ( yes, someone actually was silly enough to say that to us. )
But this view fails to recognize that thanks to modern recording techniques, performance is no longer the only way of putting one’s music before the public. ( Our Recording )
Indeed far more people now listen to recorded music than attend live performances.
Of course live performances still have important social functions. They take audiences to worlds more gracious and magical than their ordinary lives, they energize warriors, warm up congregations for their preachers, help people celebrate weddings, graduations, and homecomings, create situations where the young can find mates, etc.
And of course it would be surly and ungracious not to acknowledge our enormous debt for all of the wonderful music we’ve been able to hear only because of the sweat and hard work of many dedicated performers.
So it’s quite reasonable those who perform music gain social advantages, that they earn money and carve out identities.
Still we don’t see why this gives performers the right to claim that what they do is the ultimate goal of music, or that because they perform, they are more serious musicians than those who play music without performing.
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It was more than 20 years ago when we were living in India immersed in the Varanasi classical music scene, that we first started to suspect the modern world was making a blunder to equate performance and serious music. ( The Indian Music Scene and The Street Singer )
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Advantages Of Not Performing
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By now it should be quite clear this page is doing far more than merely defending our right to avoid performance, far more than insisting there’s nothing inherently weird about serious professional musicians like ourselves refusing to strut our stuff up on the stage.
Because obviously we’re also very certain not performing has actually given us important concrete advantages in our search for radically different music.
We’ve already mentioned how playing only in private has greatly reduced our fear of sounding awkward and made it easier for us to be experimental.
But also because we don’t perform we don’t have to shape and chip away at our music until it fits some category. What we do doesn’t have to be “rock”, or “reggae”, or “funk”, or “classical”, or “twelve tone”, or “minimalist”, or “jazz”, or “bebop”, or “fusion”……
And this means we’re free to go for newness rather than having to work to give some audience the music it expects. We’re not like poor Sir Mick, who must at least occasionally shiver when one more time he has to sing “I can’t get no satisfaction”.
And since recording our own music lets us get it out there without performing, we’ve been able to skip the rigid practice demanded of performers, we’ve been able to avoid that painful species of determined repetition which even as it develops skill, digs deep grooves in the brain and traps one in old patterns ( Practice ). Not to mention that since excessive practice ( and performance itself ) greatly increases the chances of developing some career ending injury, avoiding it is one reason our music is still alive and growing after more than 20 years. ( Doing Music Differently )
While playing only in the quiet of our home means we can do it softly, can focus on the relaxation which is the royal highway to newness. And of course when we’re relaxed and our music is soft, we’re more likely to sound sweet ( isn’t loud sweetness an oxymoron? )
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To use a theater analogy, in years past actors had to speak loudly and use only grand easily visible gestures. Indeed cultures like the Greeks and Japanese even supplied performers with large masks. But now thanks to the “close-up”, movie actors can whisper powerful lines and explore subtle facial expressions. Similarly amplification now has given musicians the option of playing softly.
However not many have taken advantage of this exciting possibility, and more often even in the studio most musicians have continued to go for volume. Sigh……. old habits do die hard, and these are people who for their entire careers have had to blast past ever higher levels of ambient noise, have had to appeal to listeners with the chronically damaged hearing endemic in this modern world.
Unfortunately this unending quest for volume has limited music in all sorts of ways, has had negative effects going far beyond merely making generations of violinists deaf in one ear, and pop musicians and Beethoven deaf in both.
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Also since we haven’t performed, we haven’t had to stay up too late and hang out in noisy smoky environments, we haven’t had to travel long miles to venues and eat unhealthy restaurant food, and we haven’t had to play when our heads or our stomachs ached.
Indeed since most of the time when we play we’re not even recording, more than anything else our music has been something we’ve done for our own pleasure and sanity.
And obviously this has helped keep our love of music alive.
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A third factor making it much easier to avoid burnout is that right from the start we’ve been musical generalists. So we’ve built our own instruments, played all of them, done all of our own recording and sound editing, and used writing this website to explore our understanding of music. ( Unspecialized )
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Our Performing ?
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Having said all of this, it’s perhaps time to point out there’s one sense in which we are performers…. it’s just we’re performers who perform only in our own home with our microphones as our only audience. ( Our Recording )
Of course this somewhat extends the conventional meaning of “performance”, but we feel it’s a reasonable extension since when we’re recording it does make things different, it does supercharge our experience in a way similar to what many musicians claim happens during performance.
Because even if it’s only our microphones that are the audience, they do focus our attention and make us more critical. Then we can’t just cruise along enjoying the feeling of playing music, then there’s part of us which is always asking “what will this sound like to someone else?”
And naturally this affects the way we play.
For one thing, it encourages us to listen to each other more carefully and so leads towards music which sounds even more magically together.
But also when we’re in a recording phase and are recording several times each week, we start playing more slowly because we’ve discovered playing fast, while it’s fun to do, often doesn’t sound so good recorded.
And because it sounds better recorded, we start playing more in the lower registers of our Bowus Family instruments. For the same reason we get more careful about avoiding the wolf notes of our Kalimba Family instruments, as well as paying more attention to precisely how we hit their keys, to the sweetness and ring of the tones we are producing.
But doesn’t this in effect mean we’ve learned to play for our recording equipment even as performers learn to play for their audiences?
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A Final Irony…
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As a final irony we would like to suggest a listener enjoying our recorded music may actually be hearing a more authentically live performance than is offered at many concerts.
Because what’s offered at a concert is often something that’s been rehearsed so many times practice has washed every last bit of spontaneity out of it, whereas our recorded stuff is truly improvised and so more truly live.
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Doing Music Differently***Practice***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family***Our Recording***Unspecialized
The Indian Music Scene****The Street Singer
Home****Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****Buy Our Music
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