Digital boy, analog world
Jul. 13th, 2006 05:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishA month or so ago, while I was staying at Stephen and Shondra's, I broke out my cello. Tuned it up, surprised myself by still being able to do that much. Played a few songs. Determined that I'm at about a second- or third-year level. My fingers still know where first position is, and with only a little time they find second through fourth alright. I can't shift nearly fast enough to play anything for real, though.
I was never a very good cellist. I practiced (not nearly enough), I took lessons for many years, I played in orchestras and quartets, but I was missing something. Partly it was the practice. More of it was a lack of any kind of soul to my playing. I always secretly suspected that you could program a robot to play the cello as "musically" as my teachers were telling me to play it. Notes, dynamics, tempo, it's all reducable to digital eventually.
Point of the story: that night, in the middle of a Gavotte from Suzuki book 2 or 3, I shocked myself by actually playing the dynamics (volume changes) as written. Not because they were written, but because I could tell, for the first time in my life, that that was how the piece was meant to sound. I'm no longer remotely in practice, and who knows if I'll have the time or inclination to play once I'm moved in, but I seem to have some sort of intuitive grasp on the nebulosities of music now. I'm honestly not sure what to make of that.
I took a semester-long photography class in high school. It was easily the single coolest class I had. Playing around in the darkroom is its own reward. More than that, though, there was the sensation that I could draw a box around a scene and have it be Art, have it evoke an emotional response. I even shot a couple of pictures that succeeded in that goal.
But it's not something I've ever understood. I look at pictures other people have taken, and I catch my breath. They're just that damn good. I know it's all in angle, and lighting, and subject matter, and focus, and frame, and I still have no comprehension of how they work.
Case in point: this photograph. The post is worth reading, too, but the photo caught me for unrelated reasons. It's beautiful. The light, the positioning. I could take a thousand pictures and get that lucky once-- and maybe, maybe, recognise it and not throw the picture away with the other nine hundred ninety-nine. Technique, yes, but more importantly knowing how to apply it. Seeing the photograph that will be, and saying "This is good."
Words are easy. I know how to make them do what I want. I should; I've been busily surrounding myself with them from the time I was five.
Yet I can't explain it. I can't tell other people, "This is how to write." Words about words fail me, as do words about music, or photography.
Ultimately the world is analog, after all.
I was never a very good cellist. I practiced (not nearly enough), I took lessons for many years, I played in orchestras and quartets, but I was missing something. Partly it was the practice. More of it was a lack of any kind of soul to my playing. I always secretly suspected that you could program a robot to play the cello as "musically" as my teachers were telling me to play it. Notes, dynamics, tempo, it's all reducable to digital eventually.
Point of the story: that night, in the middle of a Gavotte from Suzuki book 2 or 3, I shocked myself by actually playing the dynamics (volume changes) as written. Not because they were written, but because I could tell, for the first time in my life, that that was how the piece was meant to sound. I'm no longer remotely in practice, and who knows if I'll have the time or inclination to play once I'm moved in, but I seem to have some sort of intuitive grasp on the nebulosities of music now. I'm honestly not sure what to make of that.
I took a semester-long photography class in high school. It was easily the single coolest class I had. Playing around in the darkroom is its own reward. More than that, though, there was the sensation that I could draw a box around a scene and have it be Art, have it evoke an emotional response. I even shot a couple of pictures that succeeded in that goal.
But it's not something I've ever understood. I look at pictures other people have taken, and I catch my breath. They're just that damn good. I know it's all in angle, and lighting, and subject matter, and focus, and frame, and I still have no comprehension of how they work.
Case in point: this photograph. The post is worth reading, too, but the photo caught me for unrelated reasons. It's beautiful. The light, the positioning. I could take a thousand pictures and get that lucky once-- and maybe, maybe, recognise it and not throw the picture away with the other nine hundred ninety-nine. Technique, yes, but more importantly knowing how to apply it. Seeing the photograph that will be, and saying "This is good."
Words are easy. I know how to make them do what I want. I should; I've been busily surrounding myself with them from the time I was five.
Yet I can't explain it. I can't tell other people, "This is how to write." Words about words fail me, as do words about music, or photography.
Ultimately the world is analog, after all.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 03:01 am (UTC)Jen, the roommate of 4 years, has always had trouble shaping phrases out of saxophone music [her instrument]. She always attacks it from the rhythms and then the notes, then dynamics, but building and decaying mostly escapes her without input from an external source.
I've learned with vocal pieces that one cannot create music until the notes and words are memorized, committed to muscle- and mental memory, so that you no longer have to concentrate on what comes next; you only focus on connecting the words and musical arches to emotion and shape. ;] This is why student recitals are terrifying, as you never have enough time to have all your rep freely committed to memory -- I perform petrified, desperately not forgetting words, while throwing meaning into them. It's gotten easier/better over time.
It takes a deep understanding to turn music into more than just notes and rhythms. Sometimes it takes years of aural inundation; how would you ever know the right way to shape a phrase in a cello concerto if you've never spent time listening to classical cello? Feeling how a line builds tension into its release is one thing to technically understand. It's another thing entirely to feel it.