Unclassicking

In the process of undoing my classical training to become a different sort of musician, I thought I would share insights and methods. These are geared towards other musicians who want to get better.

I tried and failed to quit music. I took about a year out and did a Master's in Psychology, through which I learned loads of academic particulars spanning the field, conducted independent research, and, based on none of these things, had an identity crisis and uncovered my own psychological need to be a musician.

The return to music has been somewhat resource-limited – but constraints breed creativity (and some semblance of focus). In my attempt to quit music, I sold all my instruments, donated a chunk of the money, set another chunk aside, and used the rest to live off. I'm a classically trained percussionist and our instruments are not only expensive (especially the ones I prefer), but we need loads of them. I'm working on rebuilding a collection and am excited and terrified to reconnect with my instrument again.

For now, I have a keyboard and electronics. And motivation & me.

With these, I'm running a series of experiments to become a better musician.

The skillset my classical training endowed me with is deep knowledge and technical facility on my instrument family, awareness of the components of music-making and how to identify them, and a quick ability to translate symbols into practice (sight-reading). What I can't yet do is make beautiful music on the spot by just listening (or, at least not as well as I'd like to), nor can my ear pick up on the things the symbols indicate – although I can quickly see a secondary dominant when looking at a score, I am nowhere near as quick at being able to play it and move smoothly between that and related tonalities without getting lost, nor can I recognise it with conviction in the context of a performance.

I'm pretty dissatisfied with both my ears and my ability to translate functional harmony into practice. In general, sight-reading and playing an instrument are great, but that's not what music is. A friend gently reminded me that this dissatisfaction comes from failing to recognise that I only find certain things (namely: sight-reading) easy because I'm good at them, which is nice to hear, but I also don't care. I want to be better at the other stuff. It's important.

Our undergraduate theory and aural skills classrooms fed us plenty of exercises that trained aspects of the music thing I'm talking about. We had to sight-sing melodies, analyse form and functional harmony, understand chord-scale relationships (I also studied jazz theory), and write out tone-row matrices... However, these were isolated from practice, and although I'm sure they helped a lot, I now feel like I'm going back to the basics to catch myself up to be able to implement these.

An analogy: I imagine it's a bit like being a research methods aficionado. You know all the qualitative methods, quantitative methods, and statistical analysis options, and you're well aware of each method's limitations. But one day you wake up and realise you haven't questioned the assumptions upon which they're based, and decide to dive into epistemology, which will probably keep you busy until you're dead. That's what I feel I'm trying to do with music.

The experiments I'm running are yielding progress.

Thus, I thought I would start sharing them through a new series: "Unclassicking."

I make no promises of regularity of posts. I'm a creative after all. Most of these will be geared towards other developing musicians, but I'll throw in anecdotes and memories to keep it interesting for a general audience. I might post exercises or études that will be free to use. Some of the upcoming topics:

- cultivating pitch recognition using data collection

- transposing a Bach Invention into all 12 keys, the hard way

- developing improvisatory language, both systematically and extemporaneously

- composing art music with zero official training; trials and tribulations

- rejecting traditions and cultivating disagreeability (not uniquely musical skills)

I hope this brings you inspiration, insight, and pleasure as a reader. Thanks for joining me on this new journey. More soon(ish)...