Today’s edition of Musician’s Motivator looks at ways we can build up our creative resiliency.

Try Something New.

Last week, I asked our goddaughter, Bree, what she wanted to do on our weekly date. She suggested a treasure hunt. Great idea, Bree! I don’t think you have to be 14 to appreciate a treasure hunt. We mid-century citizens of the world can enjoy them, too.

I did some googling and found letterboxing.org. This site lists treasure hunts by area (city, zip, neighborhood) and also by date placed. I found one in SE Portland that had been created in August, 2009.

A treasure hunt provides clues for the hunter to decode. In letterboxing, the found treasure consists of a small blank booklet, rubber stamp, and stamp pad. You bring your own personal rubber stamp to mark in the booklet and use the stamp in the found treasure stash to mark in your own log book. Since we were newbie letterboxers and didn’t have our own personal rubber stamps, we wrote messages and drew pictures in the booklet at each found treasure.

Be Creative.

At a future get-together, Bree and I will create a new treasure hunt and add it to the letterboxing website for others to enjoy finding.

Improvise.

My students have been learning how to improvise, as in creating music on the spot! This is in preparation for the Spring recital, Sonata Improv. Each musician will prepare a solo, a fully-notated piece of music; and add an improvised section to the piece.

Improvisation is such a daring act. And yet, not so scary when approached gently. We’ve been working on exercises to get the improv muscle strengthened. Each week, I’m pleasantly surprised at the new musical creations that come out of their instruments. Rather, the music that *they* create!

Keep Learning.

Last Saturday, I enjoyed a performance by Belle Voci, a 24-voice women’s vocal ensemble. They sang a great variety of styles and languages. In addition to English, they sang in Latin, French, a West African tongue, German, Spanish, Italian, and Estonian.

It was the Estonian piece that has stayed with me. Since hearing it, I have undergone a journey of learning about Estonian music. Lauliku Lapsopõli is an Estonian folk song arranged by Veljo Tormis for female voices.

A solo voice begins the piece, singing the haunting melody in a clear, high voice. Soon she is joined by more and more voices layering tight, high harmonies above her. The sounds are exquisite, evoking images of high mountain snow and ice for me.

However, the lyric speaks of summer and birds and ducks, and how the singer learned so many songs.

“When I was very little, al’leaa,
I grew so prettily, al’leaa,
I was but one night old, al’leaa,
just two days old,
mother took my cradle to the meadow,
put my crid on the heath,
put a duck to rock the cradle,
the bird of summer to push me.
The duck had many words,
the bird of summer had lots of songs,
the duck sang many songs to me there,
the bird of summer, it spoke to me a lot.
That is where this child learned the songs,
this crazy one [got to] know the words,
all of them I placed on paper,
all of them I hewed into a book.
That is why I have so many words,

that is why I have lots of tunes.“

Ongoing Process

When I was at the library on Sunday, I checked out a CD of orchestral music just because it had the word Estonia on the jacket. It is the music of Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg, performed by the Estonia National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Paavo Järvi. Trying something new.

How are you flexing your creative muscle? By trying something new? By continuing to learn? By improvising? All of these? Oh, that’s great to hear!

Thanks for reading! The next edition of Musician’s Motivator will be out on Wednesday, March 24, 2010.

If you liked this, you may also want to read:

• How To Develop A Curious Practice
• The Amateur of Music and Beginner’s Mind
• Head And Heart Of Music

Bookmark:

A musical game of jacks enhances learning through play.

Have you ever played jacks? It’s that game of agility and speed played with a small rubber ball and a set of 10 six-pointed jacks.

The rules are simple enough, but the achievement of “threes-ies” can take many hours. Scatter the jacks on a flat, hard surface. Toss the ball into the air, pick up one jack and catch the ball after only one bounce. A game of Ones-ies is completed by picking up all 10 jacks, one at a time in the process described above.

Twos-ies, as you might guess, is played by tossing the ball into the air, picking up two jacks and catching the ball after only one bounce. Continue tossing the ball and picking up two more jacks until all are picked up.

Oh, and use the same hand to toss the ball, pick up the jacks, and catch the ball.

Using Multiple Senses

I was mulling over how we musicians use our senses – in particular, sight, sound, and touch – in learning and playing music. When a student is struggling with reading music and recognizing notes, I instruct them to do a multi-sensory exercise that goes like this:

• Look at and point at each individual note.
• Say aloud the name of the note as you point to it.
• Notate the music on a separate piece of staff paper, and say the name of each note as you notate it.
• Finger the note on your instrument while saying aloud the note name and looking at the note in the music.
• Play each note while looking at it on the staff and say the note name in your head.
• Sing each note while pointing to it or fingering it.
•    

This method of learning is very effective. Students often see results right away as their confidence in note-naming and note-reproduction increases. Because they are using multiple senses in the exercise, the learning attaches in a number of places in the brain. Recalling the material later is quicker and easier.

Sing, Say, Play

Suppose that each learning variation above might be a different jack from the game of jacks. Saying the name of the note as you point to it could be your Ones-ies. Threes-ies might be something like saying the name of the note as you point to it and then singing the pitch. I’ve prepared some suggested guidelines, and created some audio files and written music for you to use to get going. Read through my suggestions below, download the files, and play some Musical Jacks!

Gather your gaming materials

1. Download and print the music (PDF) for your particular instrument.    
   • Musical Jacks Treble Clef C Instruments
   • Musical Jacks Bb Instruments
   • Musical Jacks Eb Instruments
   • Musical Jacks F Instruments
   • Musical Jacks G Instruments
   • Musical Jacks Bass Clef C Instruments
2. Download the audio file (MP3). The files are provided in both bass and treble range. Choose whichever range is more comfortable for your voice. I also created slow and medium tempo files; 60 BPM and 100 BPM.        
   • Treble 60 BPM (7.7 MB)
   • Bass 60 BPM (7.7 MB)
   • Treble 100 BPM (4.6 MB)
   • Bass 100 BPM (4.6 MB)

Ones-ies, Twos-ies, Threes-ies…

I came up with eight different ‘jacks to pick up.’

1. Sing La: sing the pitch sounded on a syllable of “la” or “ma.”   
2. Speak: speak the pitch name.   
3. Point: point to the note on the music.       
4. Sing Pitch: sing the note name on pitch, i.e. “cee-sharp.”   
5. Notate Treble: on a treble clef staff, draw an empty oval (whole note) on the appropriate space or line.           
6. Notate Bass: on a bass clef staff, draw an empty oval (whole note) on the appropriate space or line.          
7. Finger: position your fingers as you would to play the pitch on your instrument. Pianists should touch the appropriate key with alternating left and right index finger. String players should position left hand on the fingerboard and right hand or bow on appropriate string.        
8. Play: play the tone on your instrument. Pianists, play the indicated key with all five digits of alternating left and right hands, in rapid succession.

Suggested Game Play

Set the printed music on the stand, sit with your instrument on your lap or otherwise handy, and have your MP3 player within easy reach to start and stop the audio file.

Decide which ‘jack’ or how many ‘jacks’ you want to do for each pitch and start the audio file. I just played a few rounds of the game and completed fours-ies comfortably. My fours-ies were Sing La, Point, Speak, and Sing Pitch Name.

It will quickly become obvious to you once you start playing that not all jacks are created equal. For example, you can Point and Speak simultaneously and then Sing La and Finger simultaneously. But you wouldn’t necessarily be able to Notate and Play at the same time.

I can see the strategists among you are already planning how to do all eight jacks in 4 seconds. Go for it! And let the rest of us know about your Musical Jacks successes.

Comment now

Which jacks are easiest to do? Which are the most fun? How many jacks did you complete in one round? What other variations of the game have you come up with? I invite you to share your stories with me and the readers of Musician’s Motivator. Make a comment on my blog or drop me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

Thanks for reading! The next edition of Musician’s Motivator will be out on Wednesday, March 10, 2010.

If you liked this, you may also want to read:

• Brain Benefits from Noteworthy Music Practice
• Dive Into The Unknown
• 4 Ways To Get More Fun Out Of Practice

Bookmark:

Knowing and understanding our past helps us in the present. Making sense of moments in world history, we learn from humanity’s past mistakes and strive to do better or, just differently, in the future. We can also learn from the successes and continue that which was beneficial.

Genealogy, the study of family history, is a more personal way to understand the past and thereby know ourselves more completely. This knowledge of the past helps us be more fully present in our daily lives.

Visiting in the parlor room

I enjoy a phone visit with my parents each week. We live 3,000 miles apart and the phone line has become our parlor room. Our weekly calls enable us to maintain a rich, loving relationship. Our conversations often lead to stories of the past, whether it is a story about mom’s grandmother or dad’s great uncle or some other ancestor.

Singing and playing musical instruments was quite common among my forebears. One hundred years ago, music was an integral part of family life. Children sang in educational and sacred settings, and took piano lessons. Adults played in community orchestras and bands or sang in casual groups. I suspect when you ask your parents and extended family about their musical experiences, you will hear some great stories. Today, I learned a little more about my musical genealogy.

On my mother’s side…

My great grandmother had five children and encouraged, well, made them each take up an instrument. That’s them in the photo above. The eldest, my grandfather, played violin and sang soprano in a boys choir. The youngest, my great uncle Hans, played the saxophone. Great uncle Tony played the trombone.

My grandfather then passed that love of music on to my mother and all her siblings. Uncles Bob, Fred, and Allen all sang in community variety shows and in college glee clubs. As a matter of fact, it was in college glee club where my uncle Allen became friends with a young tenor named Jim.

Allen and Jim became friends and went out on double dates together. On one of those double dates, Allen invited his sister, Loretta, to be Jim’s date. Loretta and Jim hit it off pretty well; well enough to continue dating and eventually marry.

And that’s how my parents met; brought together through music. Not only do I have many ancestors with musical backgrounds, you might say music gave me life! If not for glee club, … well, I don’t want to think about it.

And on my father’s side…

There is a fair amount of music experience on my dad’s side too. Not only did Dad sing tenor in glee club, he also played violin as a boy. His aunt Alice was a music teacher and a Catholic nun. When Sister Rose Madeline visited my family, she would pass out sheet music to us kids and conduct us in song. Since my sister, Mary Beth, and I both played instruments and had some musical experience, Sister Rose expected us to be able to sight-read the harmony part. But we couldn’t. At least not yet.

Let’s Have A Singalong!

Family gatherings of all the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins always had some singing. After a meal, song lyrics were handed out, sometimes some sheet music too, and we’d sing. As Mary Beth and I got older, we accompanied the singers on flute and saxophone.

Mission Possible

Alright, readers, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to explore your musical genealogy. Ask your parents, grandparents, cousins – any living relatives:

1. What musical experiences did you have growing up?   
2. Which instrument (or voice) did you play?
3. Tell me a story about music when you were in grade school.
4. What’s your most intense musical memory from your twenties?
5. What is your favorite song or piece of music?
6. What song did you dance to at your wedding?

For my parents, it was Wonderful One by Paul Whiteman. At their 50th anniversary party, Mary Beth and I performed a vocal and sax arrangement of this song for them.

Comment now

What’s your musical genealogy? I invite you to share your stories with me and the readers of Musician’s Motivator. Make a comment on my blog or drop me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

Thanks for reading! The next edition of Musician’s Motivator will be out on Wednesday, February 24, 2010.

If you liked this, you may also want to read:

• The Amateur Of Music And Beginner’s Mind
• Blueprint to Brilliance
• Who, Me? Creative?

Bookmark:

This philosophy of learning is appropriate to learning the language of music as well. Today’s edition of Musician’s Motivator addresses how you can develop your musical speaking skills. For today, you can give your music reading skills a rest!

Benefits of Improvisation

It’s not just for jazz musicians. Bringing improvisation into your regular practice will enhance your ability to listen. And not just to music. I have found that as a result of practicing improvisation, I bring another level of awareness to conversations I have with people.

Regular musical improvisation naturally increases your attention in musical settings as well; whether you are in a musical group as one of the players or in the audience listening. In symphonic band rehearsals, I hear more of the other instruments playing. I have been pleasantly surprised by the sound of the tuba and bass clarinet playing softly in unison while I was counting measures to my next entrance; or noticing the oboe trilling above a clarinet choir. As an audience member, listening to the recent Washington Wind Symphony performance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was a treat, enriched by my own regular improvisation practice.

But Wait, There’s More!

Another benefit to regular improvisation is enhanced creativity. You will find that a little bit of creativity, no matter how small, begets more creativity. It’s like smiling at strangers on your morning walk. They usually smile back!

After establishing a regular improv practice, you may find yourself drawing more, re-arranging items on your dresser aesthetically, wearing more colorful clothing, climbing a tree, writing a short story for your children, or planning the planting of your front garden area. All this as a result of improvisation!

A habit of improvisation practice also leads to composing and arranging music. After all, improvising is just that – composing music. It just needs to be written down.

How To Practice Improvisation

Here are two exercises that anyone can do to develop the improvisation muscle. They are from my forthcoming book, Truly FUNdamentals – The Most FUN Musical Warmups Ever!

1. Take Three
2. On The Air!

Take Three

Choose any three tones that you can play on your instrument. Play those tones using any rhythm and note values. Play only those three pitches. You may include the upper and lower octaves of those three tones. Remember to use rests in your rhythms! Long note values, short note values, various articulations – all are welcome. Give yourself plenty of time to explore these three notes.

On The Air!

Turn on your radio and play along. Many radio stations specialize in one genre of recorded music. You can chose from jazz, pop, oldies, classical, folk, rock, opera, and many others. I recommend that you start with a style of music you like and with which you are familiar.

1. Pick your channel.
2. Raise the volume sufficiently so you can hear the radio music over your own instrument.
3. Listen!
4. Match the predominant tones first. This will help you establish the key center.
5. Play the melody (if it’s a song you know) or play a blending melodic line.

If radio is too old-school for you, try these online music resources: Pandora, and Musicovery.

Speak Up

Share your improv fun on my blog or drop me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

If you liked this, you may also want to read: Fueling Up At The Inspiration Station. A few months back I wrote about this exercise designed to get you playing and making music on a regular basis. Fifteen minutes of blowing into your horn, an experiment to make practice happen.

• Other recommended articles: Who, Me? Creative?
• Is There Music in The City Skyline?
• Drawing Down The Music

Bookmark:

Seeing Music In Color

Music has many mathematical elements contained therein. The idea to apply pitch to pixels is the concept behind the free software, RGB Music Lab, by Kenji Kojima.

I downloaded RGB Music Lab to try my hand at composing with a picture. During my travels in Turkey last April, one of my traveling companions took this photo of me. Hmmm… I wonder what music I look like, er uh…can I see how I sound?

In this image, I am boating on the Bosphorus Strait, the waterway separating Europe and Asia.

Pixelated Composing

To get started composing, open RGB Music Lab and drag an image onto the right panel, on top of the Mona Lisa image. The program reads the pixels row by row, from the top left to the bottom right pixel, and generates your music.

The settings can be fine-tuned on many levels. For my first piece, I kept most of the default settings and only changed instruments to 3 saxes (Sopr, Alto, Tenor) and increased tempo to 160 BPM. The result is a one minute and 24 second piece. It’s very twitchy, not at all what I imagined this image would sound like! Listen, if you are into twitchy music.

Reduce The Input

I wondered if I took just a snippet of the image; in this case the part of my face centered on my eyes; how would the song change? It turns out, I can’t just change one thing! In addition to changing the image, I adjusted the tempo, the intervals, the tonality, and the instrumentation. Now, this is getting interesting! The result is a 16-second piece, Eyes!

Now to really speed it up! Ooh, I like this two seconds of music.

A Monochromatic Soundscape

In much the same way that a composer works on her project by tweaking and massaging a beginning musical idea or phrase, I continued modifying the image source. After all, it’s the pixels and their RGB values that are providing the foundation for the sound of these compositions.

When listening to Eyes!, I found the last few rows of pixels were more interesting to me than the rest of the music. These rows were very monochromatic in their palette. For that reason, I cut a piece of the monochromatic water from the image and brought that into RGB Music Lab.

This time, I set the instrumentation to voices by choosing #54 Ooh Choir. There are 142 different instruments with everything from clarinet and trumpet and tuba to Rain and Gunshot and Dog. There are nine different types of drum kits, and about that many types of guitars, pianos, and basses.

I also changed the tonality to F harmonic minor. You can choose from major and minor scales, pentatonics, blues, and Gypsy scales. Or you can create your own scale! For a free program, Kenji Kojima has included many features.

In-Depth Free Program

You can have some serious fun exploring all the different settings. I wanted to continue playing with this application and enjoy the sound combinations produced. But if I did that, this edition of Musician’s Motivator wouldn’t get written!

Here is the final (for now) version of Bosphorus Strait by RBG Music and Meg Grace. Enjoy!

If you choose to download this program and compose with your own images, I’d enjoy hearing the music you create. Please send me a link to your composition or send the file itself. Also, let me know whether I can share it with my readers or keep it to myself.

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Inspiration of Muses

The English word music comes from the Latin musica and the Greek mousike, meaning an art presided over by the Muses. The Muses are nine sister Goddesses in Greek mythology directing song and poetry and the arts and sciences. The Muses inspire.

Inspiration, from the Latin inspirare is to breathe; also drawing air into the lungs; divine influence. Ah! When breathing in, I am inspired! Not only am I receiving life-sustaining oxygen, but I am influenced by the divine. I feel the spirit!

Spirit is from the Latin, spiritus, meaning breath. What has this trip through the dictionary revealed thus far? Music is art presided over by a Muse. Muses inspire. Inspiration is breathe and spirit.

Breathe in and out; we live. We become influenced by Spirit. Let’s look at another word that also means to breathe in: inhale. This is from the Latin inhalo, literally meaning in breath. Halo is from the Greek halos which is a round floor, the sun’s disk, and also a luminous ring. Hmmmm… Inhale the Spirit, become a Saint?

Hale is derived from the Anglo-Saxon hál meaning whole, sound, healthy, holy. Sound is from the Old English soun and the Latin sonus – a sound; that which is heard.

Sound of Music

“I breathe but air and out comes beautiful music.” It is obvious how this is true for wind instrumentalists and vocalists. And it is also true of string players and percussionists.

The air around us is Gaia’s breath, the breath of the earth. Drawing a bow across a cello string causes it to vibrate, moving the air around it at a high enough frequency to create pitch and tone. In a similar fashion, striking the skin or membrane of a drum head causes the air around the head to vibrate and give rise to pitch. In this way, we can think of strings and percussive instruments as breathing the music.

Music! It is the breath and spirit all around us. Breathe in. Breathe out. Receive inspiration. Breathe out music.

Music For The Soul

Before my mother-in-law left this morning to return to her home in Southern Oregon, we sat down to breathe in and breathe out some beautiful music together. I offer you our rendition of the German carol, Stille Nacht; music from our souls to yours.

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Once Upon A Time…

Once upon a time there lived an instrumental music teacher who had recently joined and sung in a choral group for the first time in her musical life. It was an exciting time for her! She enjoyed learning a new instrument (voice) and the experience of making music with one’s own body. Also new was the memorization of all the concert music. That part was not so exciting and caused some small distress.

Memorize, Too?

Oh, sure, I’ve sung before – just not in an organized group setting. I sing along with songs on the radio or my iPod. I’ve even memorized songs not realizing I was doing so. I memorize songs easily enough. Like many of you, I know all the lyrics to Don McLean’s American Pie and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody – without the karaoke screen prompts!

Singing with Aurora Chorus this term, I am required to memorize 16 songs that we will perform in the Dec. 20 concert. Yes, that is a lot of music, but some of the songs have simple repeated parts. Thank goodness!

On the other hand, this being a choral group, the songs all have words, something I’ve never had to contend with when playing band and orchestra music. What’s more, of these 16 songs, four of them are in a language other than English. I am also singing in Yorùbá, the language of Candomblé (Brazil); in Mbuti, from the rain forests of New Guinea; in Spanish; and in Georgian, (Republic of Georgia).

That’s What I’m Talking About!

You might expect that the songs in these foreign languages would be more challenging to memorize. Not true! One of my favorite songs and the one that has been the most fun to learn, is A jí kí ire ni Èsù, the song in Yorùbá. The melody is engaging. The 4-part voices weave among one another in an intricate rhythmic dance. The harmonies, too, are exciting with minor 7ths and 9ths over major triads, voiced in a such a way that the tonic of the chord sounds like a color tone! It’s a great song and our concert opener.

On the other hand, one of the hardest songs for me to memorize is in English, Song of Stars. It employs ever-changing time signatures, moving from 6/8 to 7/8 to 3/8 and back to 7/8. The tessitura, or vocal range of the song, for the second soprano part is a bit high for me. Yes, I can sing those notes when I am properly warmed up. It’s just not the most comfortable range for me – so far. The text is a prayer of the Algonquin people.

No Meaning

Perhaps the reason I had difficulty learning this song is that it had no meaning for me. In the beginning, I was just singing words, working on getting the rhythm correct and my entrances down. What if I read the words without the music and tried to understand what I was singing?

That helped a little bit. But the truth was, I just didn’t like the song very much. Do you remember what I reported in the previous edition of Musician’s Motivator? You retain new information better and remember it more strongly when you attach strong emotions to the subject matter, in essence, when you care about what you are studying. Well, I decided to find something to like about this song. And quickly, since the concert was just two weeks away!

I found it! I sat and listened to the song, as if for the first time, without any judgments about the lyric or the time signatures or tessitura.

I am an amateur astronomer, a devotee and enthusiastic pursuer of all things astronomical. I have relished the night sky since I was a young child. Then, I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut and explore outer space.

This song is about STARS! It even sounds like stars, with open voicings and an arpeggiated piano playing octaves and fifths. The opening piano arpeggios are tight clusters of root, fourth, fifth, and major seventh. Try that in any key on your piano. Doesn’t it sound like the stars twinkling overhead?

…And She Lived Happily Ever After.

The instrumental music teacher loved singing as much as playing her wind instruments. She sang in the concert, enjoying all the songs, and lived happily ever after.

Now the song has meaning for me and is easy to memorize. Lesson? Remember to bring Beginner’s Mind to my learning.

Are you learning something new? Struggling with a difficult subject in school? Finding something to like about the subject will make the learning more solid and you will retain more. And bringing your Beginner’s Mind to the table will help you be open to the learning along the way.

Share your learning discoveries on my blog or send me an email: meg@meggrace.com.

Some Quotes About Memory

What we learn with pleasure we never forget. – Alfred Mercier
The heart that truly loves never forgets. – Proverb
The true art of memory is the art of attention. – Samuel Johnson

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I was 6 or 7 years old when I had my first music lessons. My family didn’t own a piano, yet, I was taking piano lessons! I practiced my scales and finger patterns on a flat, folding cardboard keyboard. I remember unfolding it on the dining room table to practice.

I couldn’t received any aural feedback from my practice. Only during lessons in which I played on a real piano did I get to hear what sounds my fingers were making. The desire to make music was strong in me even as a youngster, since I continued piano lessons for a year; all the while practicing only on a cardboard piano!

A few years later, I had the opportunity to learn a band instrument. I am grateful to my parents for renting me a real saxophone.

My first year of lessons on the sax were in a group class of five or six 5th graders, taught by a local college student. I loved learning to play the saxophone; reading music, not so much.

We were taught fingerings with a numbered diagram of the sax keys. Numbers one through six were used to indicate which fingers and corresponding keys to depress. These diagrams were placed below the staff, describing the finger position for the note above.

It didn’t take long for me to learn to read the fingering diagrams. They were quite easy, in fact. About six months passed before my teacher realized I was only reading the diagrams and not the pitches on the staff.

Aural, Visual, Spatial Learning

When I am teaching someone who is brand new to reading music, I encourage use of the finger diagrams, periodically checking note identity without the diagrams. I also encourage motivated students to test themselves by erasing their drawn-in diagrams after a short period of playing with them.

We learn in different manners and at varying paces. Some of us are more visual, others are more aural. Still others learn quickest spatially. Both the cardboard piano and the finger diagrams of my early music lessons demonstrate that I am a mostly visual learner.

I used to think that being a predominantly visual learner meant that I wasn’t destined to be a great musician; that great musicians are principally aural learners. What I’ve come to understand is that all types of learners, aural, visual, and spatial, make great musicians.

Your Brain on Music

We tend to think of music solely in terms of what we hear. But research on the brain about how we process music shows that a lot more than our hearing is involved. In fact, the Auditory Cortex is only one small part of the brain that processes the various input from musical activity. Further, those parts of the brain that are stimulated when a person listens to music are also stimulated when the person merely hears the music in her head!

When we listen to music there is a neural symphony of activity going on in various parts of the brain. Check out the interactive brain area of Daniel Levitin’s website for his book, This Is Your Brain On Music. Dr. Levitin writes, “Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about and nearly every neural subsystem.”

No matter what type of learner you are; reading, playing, and enjoying music are within your grasp. What’s more, studying music is great exercise for the brain! Practice of a new activity fires neurons and creates connections and pathways throughout the brain. Repeated practice reinforces the new neural pathways. Reading, playing and listening to music appears to stimulate more areas of the brain than any other activity, according to research thus far.

And something else, when you are studying something that is important to you or that carries with it a lot of emotion, the brain tags these new memories with more importance and you retain the information better. Caring about a subject (like the strong longing to be a musician) accounts for some part of how quickly you will acquire your new skills.

It’s a Win-Win!

Wanna improve your brain activity? Study music.
Wanna study music, but have doubts about your innate musical talent? Do it! Not only can you discard those doubts, a music practice is good for you!

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For today’s newsletter I have brought together a collection of quotes that express a train of thought I’ve had; and well, these folks just express it so well!

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Mozart is certainly one to know about genius. Love is the soul of genius. Ah, put your heart into your endeavors; don’t hold back; be in love with your efforts. Make leaps into the creative unknown.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

Good advice from both Ella and Amadeus for every musician. In learning and practicing a musical instrument, voice included, there is no room for caution. As Confucius says, “The cautious seldom err.”

Mistakes are part of the learning experience. And many times, are just part of the experience! Mistakes do not know the difference between professionals and amateurs.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously; where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Henry Ford agrees, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”

What happens when you put your love and inspiration into your music?

A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world; it depends on your imagination.

One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are.

Any good jazz player has innumerable tricks he can fall back on whenever he gets stuck. But to be an improviser you have to leave these tricks behind, go out on a limb and take risks, perhaps occasionally fall flat on your face. In fact, what audiences love most is for you to go ahead and fall. Then they get to see how you manage to pick yourself up and put the world back together again.

Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.

Allow yourself to be inspired. Give yourself permission to fall on your face and feel your saxophone play you.

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.

And where does magic come from? I think that magic’s in the learning.

Now we’ve come full circle, back to the concept of genius:
A genius is the one most like himself.

Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.

Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass… it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

Having collected all these quotes, I am inspired to make music. I feel the soulfulness of Janis Joplin, the playful unrestrained creativity of Mozart, and the passion of Ella Fitzgerald all coursing through me, swirling and whirling in me, demanding release. I hope this collection will inspire you to play your cello or harmonica or whatever your instrument, like the true genius you are!

Got a quote to share? Got a motivational experience to contribute? Email me or add your comment below.

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We often describe music, an aural art form, using visual descriptors. We talk about the texture created by a particular instrument group. Or perhaps the colors the key generates in our mind’s eye. Have you ever noticed how major keys tend to prompt bright colors, compared to more subdued colors of the minor keys. And then there is the shape of the music. We describe the phrasing and the form in physical terms.

The natural extension of describing music in visual terms is to draw it out! That’s what today’s ezine will show you how to do.

Pictures At An Exhibition

Do you know the story of Mussorgsky’s composition, Pictures At An Exhibition? He wrote this suite in honor of his artist friend, Viktor Hartmann, who died suddenly at the age of 39. The stunned Russian art community organized an exhibit of over 400 pieces of Hartman’s work. After viewing the collection, Mussorgsky composed Pictures in six short weeks.

There are other examples of musical compositions inspired by art. Franz Liszt wrote Hunnenschlacht (The Battle of The Huns) based on art of the same name by von Kaulbach. Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky were no strangers to this practice. The more contemporary composer, Stephen Sondheim, wrote the musical, Sunday in The Park With George inspired by Seurat’s 19th century painting Sunday Afternoon on The Island of Grand Jatte.

Music-Inspired Art

And what about the reverse? That is, art that is inspired by music. There is plenty of that too. Searching for examples of music-inspired art (MIA), I found the RedBubble website. They have a whole section of the site devoted to MIA. That’s where I saw this painting by Susan Kimball, Dream Mambo that she drew while listening to a recording of Nica’s Dream by Horace Silver.

Making Music Art

This morning, I listened to Branford Marsalis’ Creation cd. This 2001 release is a beguiling collection of music by French composers. Marsalis performs on soprano and alto saxophones with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. I got out my sketch pad, colored pencils and ink pens; and began to draw while listening to Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde as performed by Marsalis and Orpheus.

As I listened to the opening sounds by Marsalis’ alto saxophone, I let my pen glide across the page. As the music crescendoes and jumps in greater intervals, my pen reacts. The trumpets and percussion enter and the jazzy theme is developed. Some of my pen markings are abstract, other marks resemble objects in the world.

I listened and drew through two hearings of the seventeen and a half minute piece. On the first listen, I used pens of various point sizes. Second time through, only colored pencils were in my hands.

Surprise Learning

What a fantastic way to listen to a piece of music! What started out as an exercise linking art and music became an enjoyable way to learn. While focusing solely on the act of drawing, the music seeped deep into my soul. The various themes of the music came to life before my eyes.

The flowing “birth” music at the start shows up as curving parallel lines. The music intensifies and a colorful volcano-like structure appears in my drawing. Then feathery phrases from the alto and lower strings manifest feathers on my drawing. A musical uproar produces what could be seen as a cityscape, complete with a sax player under a streetlamp!

Go Deep

Is there a song or piece of music that is on your mind? Do you wake up with phrases from a song on your lips or a melody in your ear? That song is a good candidate for this drawing exercise.

• Draw out your song using different media; crayons, acrylic paints, or a lump of clay.
• Divide your paper into equal-sized grids and draw each 30 seconds (or other appropriate time period) in each grid square.
• Create a drawing in the morning and compare it to a drawing made in the evening of the same song.

What other ways can you think of to experience music more deeply? I’d love to hear from you and see any art you create. Contact me via email or share your comments on my blog.

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