Re this from @jasonkoebler, two things:

Paul Cantrell

If there’s any •purpose• to living things, if our existence is •for• anything, surely creating music is part of that purpose. Not just outputting music; living music, breathing music, struggling with and through music, experiencing music fully as both creator and listener. Our purpose.

And if this extractive capitalism of our current world is good for anything, it’s killing purpose, reducing everything to an empty husk. So to be clear, I’m not just saying “fuck you, Mikey Shulman, you cheapen my work as a musician;” I’m saying “fuck you, Mikey Shulman, you’re trying to destroy what gives our human existence meaning.” •That• kind of a fuck you.

/end

Paul Cantrell

Yes. Both market economics and policing of artistic hierarchy make us forget that the point isn’t to be the •best• at it; the point is to •do• it.

People don’t always play music to win or to profit or to pass their juries. People play to •play•. That piano rep we quarantine in concert halls nowadays is supposed to be for the home — and primarily for the enjoyment of the player, whether perfecting it or just fumbling through it. (Somebody called the piano “the big-screen TV of the 19th century.”)

Keep playing, @jredlund.

Guitarsophist (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] I have been playing guitar for 50 years. I am still maybe advanced intermediate. It has never been my career. But I feel sorry for people who don't know an instrument. Even if you play only a little, you hear so much more in music. This is from "Blues for the Muse" by the Incredible String Band: And most any morning, most any morning I like to be born into my guitar day They say it's all butterflies Don't let your dreams get in your eyes But Orpheus made the sunrise 'Cause he knew how to play

Linux.Pizza (social.linux.pizza)

Jen

@inthehands @jasonkoebler being part of a community orchestra gives me so much.

I can immerse myself in a community based on a shared interest. I collaborate and connect with them in a way that trandcends language. I can focus on a skill that isn't about survival, but about joy. I get to be competent at one of the few things long covid hasn't stolen from me. It gives me self-worth and self-confidence when both are suffering.

And this is just a tiny slice of my experience of music.

Paul Cantrell

Yes, @JetlagJen centers something I’d only alluded to: creation is connection; creation is community. That’s a crucial part of this too. A world where all art is automatically generated is an unimaginably lonely world.

Jen (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] being part of a community orchestra gives me so much. I can immerse myself in a community based on a shared interest. I collaborate and connect with them in a way that trandcends language. I can focus on a skill that isn't about survival, but about joy. I get to be competent at one of the few things long covid hasn't stolen from me. It gives me self-worth and self-confidence when both are suffering. And this is just a tiny slice of my experience of music.

Geekdom (geekdom.social)

Paul Cantrell

And an addendum, just in case it’s not clear:

I’m talking about music, but I see all of the above in people perfecting their cookie recipe, or working out a mathematical proof, or writing fanfic, or writing a static site generator for no good reason, or lovingly patching a torn garment. All creative work.

What I said about the piano as the center of the home mostly is in the past, but that creative instinct — so quintessentially human — is alive and well. Yes, even today.

Bleistifterin

@inthehands @jasonkoebler I don' t remember the exact quote or where she said it, but Dorothy Sayers wrote somewhere that God created Us in his image, and thus as creative and creating beings. Always loved this and feel it is correct on an almost instinctive level

Paul Cantrell

@bleistifterin @jasonkoebler

Yes. Then extend this to the whole universe, seeing us as a part of it, and you’ve got the idea of my thread.

Rufus J. Cooter

@inthehands Yes to this whole thread!

STG, these chuds would build a robot that can do a kickflip on a skateboard, then bring it down to the park and be like, "isn't this great, kids!? Now you can get rid of your boards! The robot can do kickflips for you!"

Jen

@inthehands All. Creative. Work.

I see it in intricate metalwork dug up after hundreds of years lost. It's in cave paintings, moai statues, and Nascar lines. Creativity in a million guises echoes through the heart of every human who has ever lived.

We can create ever more complex tools to support our creativity, but they can never replace it.

tentative existence

@inthehands Another yes to the whole thread. The time I spend with music has so much going on that has nothing to do with entertaining anyone else. I love to spend time with a piece I'm learning and stop right in the middle and really think about how things work, what's going on in the structure of the music, then going back to playing while trying to stay connected to whatever new awareness I've managed - it's one of the best things I do for myself.

Bleistifterin

@inthehands @jasonkoebler oh I just posted it to agree

sollat

@inthehands
All of those things make your connection to life more visceral. I was thinking just the other day about how learning to play the piano informs how I type, my mental connection to my hands. And how that weirdly connects to learning gymnastics and art and baking.

girlfags 💘 dykeboys

@inthehands

This is spot on! I might share a newly written song with a creative friend and I love to gather with likeminded folks and create something together, but I don't release music anymore, neither digitally or physically. And even before the ongoing COVID pandemic I had stopped playing live because for me that isn't an important part of songwriting, and I'm a songwriter, not a performer. I refuse to be commodified or intellectualized, for me art *is* the process of creating. I want to embody and be inspired by that process, not what someone else thinks or how well they enjoy whatever is left behind when I'm finished with the creative act.

Paul Cantrell

@fedivergent

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.