6: Play music
This actually happened the other day. The words are a paraphrase, but the gist of the conversation is exact:
Girl 1: My partner is a composer, he writes music.
Girl 2: What does he play?
Girl 1: Oh, he doesn't play anything.
And there you have in a nutshell one of the biggest things that's gone wrong with so-called classical music in the past century or so.
We're very clever, us composers*, with our writing-things-down behaviour. You can do lots of impressive, complex things written down, sometimes so complicated that no-one can actually play them. There's a difference between pushing a player's technique and stamping all over it, and the only way you'll learn the difference is if you play music yourself.
As I typed that last sentence I horrified myself. Does it really need to be said that you should play? Well apparently it does. Theory's all well and good - hell, I'm full of theories - but practice is what really matters. Notations and systems and scores can blind you to the most important thing: Music isn't an object. It's an activity. There may be something more perverse you can do than write music while not performing it, but I can't think what it might be.
*"Composers" here refers specifically to people writing down stuff in the tradition of Western European "Art" music. I'm not sure other musical traditions make this sort of distinction.
This actually happened the other day. The words are a paraphrase, but the gist of the conversation is exact:
Girl 1: My partner is a composer, he writes music.
Girl 2: What does he play?
Girl 1: Oh, he doesn't play anything.
And there you have in a nutshell one of the biggest things that's gone wrong with so-called classical music in the past century or so.
We're very clever, us composers*, with our writing-things-down behaviour. You can do lots of impressive, complex things written down, sometimes so complicated that no-one can actually play them. There's a difference between pushing a player's technique and stamping all over it, and the only way you'll learn the difference is if you play music yourself.
As I typed that last sentence I horrified myself. Does it really need to be said that you should play? Well apparently it does. Theory's all well and good - hell, I'm full of theories - but practice is what really matters. Notations and systems and scores can blind you to the most important thing: Music isn't an object. It's an activity. There may be something more perverse you can do than write music while not performing it, but I can't think what it might be.
*"Composers" here refers specifically to people writing down stuff in the tradition of Western European "Art" music. I'm not sure other musical traditions make this sort of distinction.
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