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Hello everyone.

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This episode is dedicated to artists, future artists, wannabe artists, art or music students. Today we will go to the hot core of the issue that every artist faces.

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This will be a two-part episode about the dilemmas around creative work, which is something artists deal with on a daily basis. If you play an instrument and you are familiar with this podcast.

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And my own musical work. You know how relevant this topic is, how fundamental it is for music makers to operate in some kind of balance between the many forces around the creative process on various music podcasts we have addressed in multiple occasions. This topic. It is one of my favourite subjects.

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Investigate as a music creator and as a book reader. In fact, today I'm going to read and comment from the book Art and Fear.

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By David Bales and Ted Orland. Subtitles observation on the perils and rewards of art making.

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In this book I found plenty of thought-provoking reflections on the idea of art making art the role of artists, the relationship between art and society, and the relationship with the public. All sorts of insightful ideas that can be easily transferred.

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To the music world.

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As someone who inhabits the space of music as a listener and Music Maker, I too often had to confront some recurring problems, some around the quality of my work, the confidence or lack thereof around my abilities. The feedback and appreciation from the public or the world around me, the gap between.

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What I want to do and achieve artistically and in my own career versus what I actually do and I achieve in terms of work and its public recognition, it is a vast top.

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And this book provides with a broad, yet handy and helpful guide through the many challenges that every artist faces. One big message is that those many challenges are mostly a small set of them, taking many appearances hard to keep track of, and even more.

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Difficult to disentangle from our own lives, our own motivations, and.

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Personal attachments, in other words.

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What prevents us from becoming true artists is most often, if not always.

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Exactly what enables us to value and appreciate art or music in its most profound ways.

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Let's see if after this episode we have a better grasp of this idea. I have personally made peace with most of these challenges, and I can openly admit that the cost of that piece was essentially my entire creative life by.

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That, I mean, it took me very long to find my own balance and I really appreciate when a book like art and fear.

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Can capture in clear simple words what these challenges fundamentally are.

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The chapter I'll be quoting from is called the nature of the problem.

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It's in four points and today we're going to look at the first two, the four points here are Point 1:

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Art making involves skills that can be learned.

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Point 2: art is made by ordinary people.

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Point 3:

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Making art and viewing art are different at their core.

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Point 4:

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Art making has been around longer than the art establishment.

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So let's let's start looking at the first one. Art making involves skills that can be learned, and I quote.

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The conventional wisdom here is the while craft can be taught, art remains a magical gift bestowed only by the gods. Not so.

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Even talent is really indistinguishable over the long run from perseverance and lots of hard work.

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End of quote.

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So I'm going to give you a few comments on this. I think wild art and I'm including music in this might be a space inhabited by.

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Unknown forces craft is not it is open, it is accessible and available to everyone.

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Craft is the activity.

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That requires motivation, patience, attention takes focus, requires the resilience and hard work, but inspiration instead just it just comes whenever we cannot really plan it. We cannot command it.

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Craft is what educates your taste and skills and is what keeps you in touch with the real world. And I mean, you need education, you need instruments, materials, you need models. You need to develop parables, you need.

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Locations and public opportunities to showcase your work or or performances you get to engage in cultural discourse. Like other people with like minded people.

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These are all skills that one gets to learn in the process of refining his or her craft.

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As someone who has spent most of his life in the area of crafts, with perhaps a few real art experiences, if I look at my music education from the start, I'd say until now I see that.

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Every time I became deeply passionate and interested in a musical style or technique.

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A pattern in my behaviour would emerge, one that I only recognised much later and that now I see happening in many of my students. Here is the pattern.

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Initially I think.

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Wow, this music sounds amazing, which triggers the desire to imitate it.

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So I do it badly so badly that after a while I get tired and give it up, but the desire is still there. So after a while I go back, this time with a calmer and more analytic attitude, perhaps supported by having found in the meantime.

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Extra helpful resource.

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Now I still cannot imitate it, but I have a broader understanding of what that is, why it is difficult. The technical challenge and I start messing around with it.

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Weeks, months later, I am familiar enough so that I am capable of building basic exercises around it.

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Compared to the initial trigger, which is the music that I wanted to imitate in first place, what I do is still very basic and uninteresting. But now I have a better sense of how that artist I listen to is employing that technique.

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And with some patience and playfulness, I stick with it to the point that without me realising that new practise became part of my routine and after a year or two, I feel I can be creative and original with it.

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This pattern of behaviour points out how easy it is in the beginning to believe that a piece of music will love is the result of a godly type of inspiration which some artists appear to be blessed by.

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But after having gone through the whole journey from scratch to basic exercises to more advanced exercises to eventually some creative ideas, one just sees more clearly how that artist got their.

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Themselves, they just did it some time before you did.

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And as a final comment on the first point, if you are listening to this podcast, chances are that you are not a fool, musical artist, or at least you don't feel you are well.

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Make yourself a good, solid Craftsman in music.

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Second point.

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Art is made by ordinary people.

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Creatures having only virtues can hardly be imagined making art. The flawless creature wouldn't need to make art, and so ironically.

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The ideal artist is scarcely A theoretical figure at all.

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Our flaws and weaknesses.

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While open obstacles to our getting work done.

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Are a source of strength as well.

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End of quote.

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So.

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How many musicians, writers, poets, painters do we know who have used their own life as the source, the subject of their work?

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Just as an opportunity to convey some meaning, truth or beauty.

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How many great artists had very difficult lives filled with sorrows and obstacles? Sometimes very short lives? Think of Mozart or Schubert, which they spend fighting a disease or trying to overcome dire economic circumstances.

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The beauty of the artwork we are so inspired by is never our representation of the flawless lives, the success and happiness of its creator.

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We are possibly projecting a desire. We want to believe that the artist is in what we hear. Mozart must have been constantly jolly. Chopin must have been always intense and sweet.

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What we would forget how Mozart was what today we would call possibly an abused child who in his late teens and early.

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90s still wandered around Europe in the constant effort to appeal to wealthy aristocracy for some funds asking for a post of musician in a court that will allow him stable earnings. Mauser, the greatest genius that the world has ever seen, begging for for some fans.

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And we would forget how Chopin suffered from tuberculosis his entire adult life.

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Dying of it at age 39, short life spent looking for a place to live, quiet and warm, where he could do what he would do best, which is write music and play the piano while he wrote a lot of music, he didn't play much, not publicly, and arguably.

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Not much at all.

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Scholars find it hard to believe that it could physically play some of the music he wrote. Think about it. You are Chopin and you practically never heard your music.

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This is to say to make art that is beautiful, worthy, and authentic, you must be flawed, incomplete, messed up in one way or another.

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And have your heart broken.

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Is a final comment. For this. I would quote someone really out of this world of music.

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Meryl Streep, in a speech of some time ago, said something she was quoting also someone else. Carrie Fisher, another actress.

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And for some reason I stick to mine addressing the artists in the room, she said.

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“Take your broken heart and make it into art.”

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Yeah.

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Thank you everyone for being with me today. This last piece was.

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You must believe in spring. I earlier played the element from.

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Bachs partita in D major and also a composition of mine called Memories from Warsaw, Memories of Warsaw.

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Inspired by Chopin piece, I hope you enjoyed this first part. Look forward to post the second part which I'm going to prepare right now and I also look forward to hear.

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Your comments to hear your ideas about it, what you think?

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Can what are your experiences with the dilemmas of artists? So let's go with that. I hope everyone has a lovely rest of the day. Bye bye.