Rock piano is not about scales, chords, arpeggios or riffs - it is about the relationship between your right and left hand.
If your hands are playing something different, there is one thing they do need to agree on, and that is time!
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Commentary
I love living today - the pace of change is exciting - especially for people who aren't where they want to be yet.
The Audience In The Artist's Space
There's an immediacy to the whole streaming video world that we've not really experienced before. As artists you can interact with your audience at the time of creation and for many people this seems to work out well.
When I'm playing I can't interact with anything else but the piano. I watch the comments afterward and it's amazing to see what people write. For music2work2 they generally fall into two categories:
- Positive or negative reinforcement
- Requests to play something
I'll take the positive comments - they feel great, I'll learn from the not so positive but as for the requests....
Do What I Tell You
There are plenty of musicians online who are doing requests - there's a cat who's got an online piano bar going - I think these are great and more power to them. If I don't play Clair de Lune or that Lady Gaga track you love - it's not that I'm ignoring you - it's that I just don't have the time.
One interaction that I particularly enjoyed after the event was the dude who was tracking what I was playing - posting the chords and demonstrating that he knew his way round a board, until he became very insistent that I move to a chord of his choosing.
It's Good But Not Perfect - Yet
As a musician, as a music business, I see Periscope as a distribution platform, not an interaction platform. The comments and hearts are great but at the end of the day it's all about Time Watched.
There's something about "Live."
The energy you get from a gig - the feeling you're left with - the sheer fucking joy of being there.
I doubt that we'll ever truly replicate that in digital, but tools like Meerkat and Periscope, great mobile hardware and blue tooth to TV are making it easier and more immersive for people to experience the creative act.
And Finally...
Feedback has always been a double edged sword - great if you're great - uncomfortable if you're not. As artists we're fascinated by what people say - oh sure - there's a tipping point where you just measure column inches, but up to that point you're looking for trends, for validation, for a reason to continue.
While the reception to music2work2 is generally positive - most people find it beautiful, relaxing, calming etc - some people don't and will never dig it. For some it's too boring, for others it lacks energy - and that's all good - the beauty of the attention economy is that they can look elsewhere.
But - when I'm down - when the creative juices aren't flowing - when I'm looking at myself and hating everything I see - when I sit at the piano and nothing comes out - I know I can always fall back on the definitive assessment of my playing, courtesy of some nine year old in Canada somewhere:
And everything starts to feel better.
Thanks Noah ;-p
Calm Down - Get More Work Done
- Calm Your Mind / Stop the inner voices / Help yourself to focus on work
- Get the new music email and a free playlist
And so the debate continues - Vicky Williamson rebuts Louisa Diller's reading of Schellenberg's work and who knows how the politicians will vote! Should society pay for music education - in the long term is there a net benefit - is there a positive ROI?
At the moment it's all in the framing of the argument - the unfortunate positioning of the "Mozart Effect" and its commercial exploitation that Music will increase your IQ, we now know to be false. But to quote Michael Jackson - we shouldn't allow one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch of girls!
The research is clear that there are cognitive benefits - though they may seem secondary in nature. For example, musical training improves auditory processing which in turn develops language processing, which in turn can develop classroom performance, something we know to be true - and yet - because it doesn't improve your IQ - should we just ignore these more subtle benefits?
Clearly I'm on the "music is good for you" side and I believe that if society does pay for early music training we will see a net benefit. The sooner our scientists can understand how it works and publish verifiable data - the sooner we can convince our politicians that it's the right thing to do.
Image Credit: Untitled - Hilary Boles - Flickr
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