Hello everyone.

Welcome back to where the music podcast today.

Wanted to talk about the difference between

music as we hear today

And as we were listening to when we were

children.

Why would that be important?

Most of the people who develop a strong

connection with music in adult life have

first studied music as children.

If you have spent your childhood in a

family that plays music either at an

instrument or on the stereo, you probably

feel that music has always had an important

role in your life.

Very often students describe their musical

experience as something along the lines of

"I really enjoyed music.

I was able to play but I never started

Theory or understood exactly what I was

playing."

Which I find out cuz I'm fairly convinced

that understanding music is something that

a child might be better at than an adult

as we shall see perhaps today.

And even if you did not learn an instrument

but you always felt you have a strong

connection with music.

It is likely the case that you had that

connection since you were very young and

that has developed regardless the style or

genres of music you were exposed to

I have spent some time in the past 10-15

years investigating the ways in which we

invent music we generate musical.

It is in the ways in which imagination

which comes from image can be applied to

sound as well.

It is a field of research that deals with

music as much as with musicology, musical

analysis, but also psychology,

neuroscience, and other more abstract fields

like Linguistics and Aesthetics.

All of these fields of which I'm certainly

not an expert my bring some light to the

way we deliver music education because in

the end music involves the perception and

understanding of sound which is

neuroscience, psychology, Aesthetics, the way

we generate an articulate ideas which has to

do with philosophy and Linguistics.

And of course the way we understand and

appreciate music.

Just to give you an idea of where I'm going

with this:

It is quite a common opinion that music is

a language and as a language, it has a

grammar, a logic and a structure. it is best if we learn

it when we are children because apparently

children absorb and internalize new ideas

faster than an adult and like a language we

can use music to express ourselves

proficiently.

I am not at all of the opinion that music

is a language.

And at the same time I do hold the view

that music education is essential to the

development of children.

It seems to me that the way children

respond to music, play with it learn to

coordinate themselves at an instrument or

by moving in tempo through dancing, all this are

essential parts of the education of a human

being that allow the child to be more

aligned with the surroundings enabling him

to develop sensitivity for what he hears

and for what he feels as a response to what

he hears.

Listening after all it is a necessary tool

for living together.

Listening is the first step towards

human empathy.

So the question what was music like when I

was a child becomes important?

If you are an adult, you might discover

that when you were a child music was a

phenomenon you had the opportunity to

participate in perhaps with freedom and

Playfulness.

Which later on might have been replaced by more

responsible and knowledgeable ways of

thinking for example music is good and fun,

but we need to participate with it with a

certain degree of discipline and commitment

with a solid method with goals and practice

in place.

You might also realize that, as I did few

years ago,

when I started pounding about it that music

wasn't necessarily made by instruments or

composed by people or performed by other

people.

When I was a child music was just there

like an out-of-this-world phenomenon.

As a child, I certainly never wondered what

music is and where does it come from. But I

took for granted that the sound coming out

of my mother's cassette player was an

existing phenomenon something that belonged

to reality as much as the table chairs and

kitchen tools near the cassette player a home.

If I recall that cassette player often

play the collection of classical music that

had a few masterpieces in it.

I remember

Brandenburg Concerto by Bach

Mozart Sonata for piano, a movement from the

New World Symphony by Dvorak and the famous

minuet by boccherini and also famous

Prelude in c-sharp minor by Rachmaninoff

and other pieces.

It makes a big difference considering that

for a child.

All this music does not really have neither

title nor composer.

It is not even performed on actual instrument

meaning...

I didn't know what an orchestra was

or a piano or a harpsichord nor what a Sonata

or a Symphony were.

So all the sounds were just pure beauty and

they triggered my imagination in very

different ways from the way

I do music today, as a professional very

much involved in practical music-making

Dealing with technique, forms, and harmony.

Do you see what I'm trying to go?

As a teacher

I know that children are not that

interested in the cause-effect

phenomenon.

We might be fascinated by as adults, as much

as they are about the parallel imaginative

world made of entities and colors and

forces and emotions and completely

invented, temporary beings and creatures

that just fill the world and add

playfulness to the reality of a child.

None of these things, entities have a name.

Which makes it very difficult for adults to

deal with, but children engaged with them

constantly and as a teacher, I always try

to let the class go into the direction the

direction in which imagination rules.

But on the other side as creative musician

as a composer myself.

I have learned the names of everything I

use in my creative activity.

I know the name of notes, chords.

I know formulas.

I know the building blocks of small and

huge musical forms.

I have studied the physics of musical

phenomenon and I could probably articulate

description of how sound functions and

maybe explain why certain things sound

better than others based on the nature of

sound. I know how musical instrument work

and so on and so on. This might help the

process of crafting new music or performing

it well in front of an audience, but from

the creative perspective, it is very hard

to imagine new things.

My commitment to awareness and knowledge

has actually limited the potential of my

imagination.

I cannot imagine things without giving them

a name anymore.

Certainly

I cannot do that as I was capable of when I

was a child.

In a sense, by bringing knowledge and

awareness to our creativity.

We are at the same time challenging the

playfulness that was intrinsic in a child's

world and that has no boundary or rule.

A child plays a variety of games at once

the rules of the games keep changing the

boundaries and limitations of each game are

not clear nor defined, neither they are

stable.

The term playfulness itself might suggest

playing a fun game.

But also suggests that fun comes from the

actor playing playing in this or that way,

playing in both ways at once, playing in no

way at all but just playing without

a purpose nor a goal, without a trajectory

nor a method.

The music I was listening to when I was a

child was not a composition written down by

old Wise composers who studied

very hard.

It was just a very playful game of

imagination.

Each piece was a journey, a small adventure into

some unknown world.

How come sound allows for all of this? It

is to me still a mystery.

Possibly the main reason why I'm making

this podcast is because it is such a

beautiful mystery that attempting to make

sense of it cannot remain a solitary

endeavor.

There were no notes or chords to speak of

there was no Melody no more complex forms

to identify music.

And this is quite a revelation given than

most of my activity as a teacher concerns

the adoption of a shared musical

vocabulary.

It is a priority for me to enable a student

to identify what they are listening to,

whether it's melody, a chord or a

particular section of the piece.

How do I justify this contradiction? So

here's the problem: as a child I connected

with music without any methodology,

no technical vocabulary,

I just related to it

thanks to the imagination that the music

was triggering.

Today a great part of my teaching involves

between a methodology and a technical

vocabulary.

You see the contradiction?

My resolution comes from the realization

that adults, most adult perhaps, not being

children anymore, need to name things.

Sometimes just to be able to see them, in

this case to hear them.

If you ever had the experience of

transcribing a piece of music you perhaps

noticed how it transformed from an inspiring

imaginative Vision, perhaps filled with

emotions and character, into a series of

practical matters, notes on the score, keys

in the piano, chords and rhythms that are

not quite so special nor perhaps original.

In other words.

It seems like you have turned the magic

phenomenon into some tangible matter.

This to me shows the gap between music with

a capital M, this beautiful phenomenon that

carries so many ideas and emotions, and its

dependency on our practical capabilities.

One of the greatest things you can see when

attending a musical concert by a

high-quality performer

is

witnessing in real-time the perfect

alignment of playfulness, childlike

playfulness and instrumental virtuosity,

which is just the result of thousands of

hours spent resolving practical matters.

Two examples come to mine in this very moment

in the classical World everytime

I see the Russian pianist

Grigory Sokolov

I'm amazed at his virtuosic piano

technique and I come to avoid to entertain

the idea that behind this big old man who

seems quite private an introvert,

there is one of the most extravagant

original child one could ever meet his

music is so playful that only a true child

can create it.

The second example is of Prince.

I recently watched the video which the

great pop-rock artist is performing a guitar

solo in a famous concert celebrating the

Beatles.

The song is While My Guitar Gently

Weeps and the solo he plays, along with the way

he actually plays the guitar in the moment,

again showed me how profound and meaningful

could be to just let your inner child

take over. At that moment Prince looks like

perhaps a 10 years old child who is having

the time of his life.

Composing and improvising is for me the

daily practice of imagination through music.

Similar to the way I was imagining through

listening when I was a child.

I need to focus forget about names chords

Frameworks and patterns forget about the

rules of the game and search all the free

associations that a sound allows me to make.

A question that I often ask myself when I

feel uninspired or unmotivated when my

notebook is empty and I'm struggling to

ride anything sometimes.

what would the eight years old

child within me like to hear

to have some fun at this very moment?

With this thought I leave you and I will

see you the next time here are the what is

the music podcast?

Thanks for listening to Where is the Music

podcast? If you enjoy this episode look

up for others, I made a few. I publish

an episode every week roughly, investigating

each time a different aspect of music, the

music making, the music listening, the

meaning of music and its relevance in our lives.

If he's very helpful for me if you like,

subscribe, follow on your favorite platform.

Where is music is on Spotify, Apple, YouTube,

TuneIn, and Google podcast if you like

to support me you're free to do so through

Patreon. Link in description.

Thank you again,

until next time..

325 00:23:49,840 --> 00:23:49,840