Re this from @jasonkoebler, two things:

Paul Cantrell

All that! One of the things that’s amazing about being a musician is that there’s a version of the piece that exists in your mind that cannot possibly actually exist as sound. Every performance is a slightly different 2-dimensional snapshot of that 3-dimensional idea.

I think listeners who really, really engage with the music can find this too. But we performers really get the best of it.

Paul Cantrell

@bleistifterin understood!! Just riffing further!

Paul Cantrell

@sollat Playing and especially composing are so deeply connected to how I write code I feel like they’re half the same thing — and I could talk about that for a thousand hours and never manage to really explain what I mean.

Paul Cantrell

@pettylarcen
I also mostly make music for myself. I mostly stopped recording and performing in 2020, have been really missing it, and have been struggling with how to do that in a way that is true to me and my creativity and not bending to fit how the world says I should approach it all. It’s a tough needle to thread! And our current era does not make it easy.

PaulDavisTheFirst

@inthehands @JetlagJen sadly, creation is not community in the same sense that it once was. As the original author of a cross-platform digital audio workstation, I often feel regret about the extent to which contemporary computer-based msuic/audio tools allow people to work alone.

I believe it to be a real and genuine problem to which I contributed (not the worst problem I've contributed to, however).

1/

Paul Cantrell

@PaulDavisTheFirst @JetlagJen
I’d say cut yourself some slack. I create a lot of my music using thoroughly pre-computer methods — pen and paper at the piano — and I can assure you that solitary creation has been an ingredient of music since forever. And that solitude can be beautiful.

I’d venture that the isolation artists feel is a product of social systems, not tools. In a functioning society, the solitary creator should still find paths to community.

PaulDavisTheFirst

@inthehands @JetlagJen that's not enough to justify slack Sure, if you want to write piano sonatas, you worked alone for the last few hundred years.

but if you were a piano player and needed drums, you used to have to find a drummer. now you just need a DAW and maybe a plugin or two.

which is both good and bad: you may live somewhere where there really is no drummer. but you may also be failing to connect with the drummer next door, so to speak.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@JetlagJen @inthehands I bang some sticks on my dry log stack.

No one hears it, but it brings me pleasure. It's fun.

alcinnz

@inthehands Funny, you're describing how I enjoy working in tech!

Paul Cantrell

@alcinnz
Don’t want to jump to conclusions, but you might be human

Paul Cantrell

@PaulDavisTheFirst @JetlagJen

Sure, there is •something• to that. But my love is solo piano music, and the primary way that repertoire has led to social connections throughout history is from people playing in the home or for small groups of friends — and also from learning and teaching it.

I see those same impulses at work in people sharing DAW tips and tricks with each other, getting together to listen to works in progress (which very much happens), etc. The instinct is there. The possibility is there. It’s social support structures — time and slack, first and foremost — that are missing.

There are always avenues for turning a completely solitary creation into a point of human connection in a well-functioning society.

Rob

@inthehands What a great thread, and well said! While I’m not a musican, the way you describe feeling and living music is perfect. Music has been super-important to me my whole life, in good times and bad. It can make me smile and it can make me cry, and that’s mostly because of the *life* imbued within by the artist. Thank you for writing this.

Paul Cantrell

I see @Gaolaitch is on a related train of thought today:

Jody Hughes (@[email protected])

I’m not full of energy just at the moment, so this is a half-thought, at best, related to AI and the arts and authorship. If you think AI can generate art, you misunderstand what art is. Art is absolutely and fundamentally not about the art itself, whether music dance verse fiction painting sculpture architecture etc. It is not about the sounds movements words plots paint marble bricks etc. It is and always has been about human connection from the creator to everyone who experiences it. I don’t care, and neither should you, if a computer can output a simulacrum of art. It is vacuous and empty, and on its own, completely dead. It is not art. #ThoughtOfMyDay #humanism

CupOfTea.Social (cupoftea.social)

Paul Cantrell

@coperob
Thank you for listening to music with your whole self!

Ben Judson

@inthehands @Gaolaitch I was reading Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater" recently, and was really struck by how much it speaks to our current moment

https://www.shiftingedges.com/kleist-marionette.pdf

Paul Cantrell

Since I mentioned Don Betts upthread, I feel like I should link to something of his. In his later years, in his 80s and even 90s, his daughter and grandson helped him make videos of himself playing his piano at home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYCRBroUi9E

I think these intimate videos capture more of what this music is supposed to be (to me, at least) than the most polished and prestigious commercial release in the world. And they are so very •Don•.

I miss him.

Marc Trius

@inthehands
I can't agree with that 100% due to value system reasons, but I do think that this is a great example why those systems represent a kind of spiritual death. It's interesting to be a witness to what real good old fashioned idolatry (as distinct from paganism, by the way) is doing to humanity.

Paul Cantrell

@alter_kaker
Yeah, I’m not sure I could agree with my own statement truly 100% without far more careful teasing out of nuances than a post allows.