[the_cat_kittles]

good post. its funny, im a musician too. i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year. ive found gypsy jazz a breath of fresh air personally... wonderful people and spirit, tons of gigs, technical virtuosity to the extreme, AND even some truly creative players. i do agree the paralells are strong esp between jazz people and swe. i dont know, you probably are further on your musical journey, but, i feel like complaining that creativity isnt present in music just means your hanging with the wrong people. in any case, a fun read, thanks

[brooklyn_ashey]

I agree, the conservatory really should fuck off. Creativity is definitely present in music, but unless you are a composer, you won't get paid for it. --not much anyway. Unfortunately, creativity doesn't really exist in classical performance anymore. When it exists in jazz, it is happening very rarely. There are exceptions, but no one knows these folks outside of jazz. - as you probably already know. The gypsy jazzers are a fun group of people, but again, it isn't creative, unless some nutball takes a really cool solo (once in a blue moon) which is such a wonderful moment when it happens. They are usually not asked to jump in much, as you probably also know. But nice to say heyto a fellow musician/engineer.

[the_cat_kittles]

you average jam, sure, its a bunch of licks mostly. but like... bireli? angelo debarre? sebastien giniaux? the list goes on... there are lots of people who come up with crazy shit on the fly. though you will find lots of licks in everyones playing

[brooklyn_ashey]

with all respect to the great players of gypsy jazz (many of whom I like) gypsy jazz and solos over changes in that style is not really creative. It is a formula that has been invented. People like it;I like it too. But it's what I mean--- not innovative. It has nothing to do with our time. It is retro like BeBop. Recreating BeBop and Gypsy jazz is not creative- it is like really cool Civil War Reenactment. This is what I mean by music lacking creativity for the most part. I mean we don't support innovators- we support technically excellent practitioners of a well-known style. This is a craft, not an art. Nothing against great craft at all-- I love it. But we are in desperate need of art. Ditto in computer programming. It is important that it notice these pitfalls.

[the_cat_kittles]

interesting. craft is central to the style sure, but its not the only thing! but in any case, im curious how you are drawing the line... surely youd call django an artist? what about antoine boyer now? he sound so new! isnt that newness an artistic vision, not just an expression of mastery of craft? maybe you think the ratio is too heavy towards craft, or that requiring such a high degree of craft to be heard in the first place is whats keeping us from hearing artists? who are the artists you know?

[brooklyn_ashey]

of course django was an artist. he innovated the style we now immitate. we don't have a ton of innovators in jazz anymore. I mentioned Mostly Other People Do The Killing. There ate many in the downtown NY scene I could mention--- I'd say Christian Marclay. Shelley Hersh. But- that is getting away from the point. the point is--- we need to put the practice of innovation and diversity of perspective to the fore in computer programming or it dies the same unknown death of monoculture.

[crdb]

> i decided the conservatory could fuck off after 1 year.

Yes and no. Remember Picasso: "It took me four years to paint like Rafael, but a lifetime to paint like a child". Being patient enough to acquire the mountains of knowledge, the sound bases achieved by generations before yours, pays great dividends later in life, no matter the field. It's truer for some fields than others, of course.

There are some surprising examples: Mika used to be a classically trained lieder singer, and won a scholarship (if I recall) to the Royal College of Music, which he promptly used to "learn to sing like a pop star" with the results we know today.

Now this is not to say you should do hours of figured bass if you want to be a blues singer (and FWIW, Arnold Schoenberg says in Harmonielehre that he thinks this is a silly way to learn harmony). But there is value in learning common practice harmony and understanding both Beethoven and Richter even if you are going to do blues.

> complaining that creativity isnt present in music just means your hanging with the wrong people

Yes and further, in order to have something interesting to say you must have lived, which is why high school concerts can be so tedious even with very talented students (mine had note-perfect Rachmaninov Paganini variations! what hope have we mere mortals... yet the pianist is now a doctor). Globalisation is also reducing the variance between artists, both because concert halls are standardising star power cross-border, and because people are becoming more alike all over the world. On the demand side, I'd whine about the Instagram generation falling short on the pathos side of things but I'd start sounding like an old man; really variance is the problem, not depth.

The only exception I can think of is of Amy Kobayashi as a tiny child doing Mozart's 26th concerto [1] in a really fresh and interesting manner (this lent truth to something a pianist who had lived through WWII told me, that Mozart could be understood only by children and those on their death beds).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32gsiqbjbk8 - note also the technique, such as the relaxed, freely rotating wrists that Neuhaus says are the hallmark of the best.

[brooklyn_ashey]

also to the "you must have lived" to have anything artistic to say... depends on your defenition of artistic. Certainly, in order to reproduce the piano compositions of middle aged European men, it might help to have lived, especially to the age of the composer. Maybe that gets in the way of your only children and the near-dead understand how to play Mozart. Martha Argerich and Pollini say hi, but when they were middle aged. This whole dusty notion of music is the basis of this completely un-artistic, elitist notion of classical music. Elitism is the good pal if monoculture. It promotes the homogenization and dumbing down of the arts and I fear it will do the same for computer programming if we aren't careful to look out for it and push back with diversity measures.

[brooklyn_ashey]

who is Mika? As to knowing Richter and Beethoven to play the blues...I think it would be difficult for someone who has the money for piano lessons and a conservatory style education with hours to practice on a Steinway in a climate controlled practice room at Juilliard ... i really think it's hard for those people to play rhe blues properly. Not to get all snobby about the blues (joking here) but I do think the player who understands how to do that might come from a different background. Also, they tend to be black, for obvious reasons. Not to say that people from other races don't experience hardships on that level, it is just that the blues is really a particular language and pathos from a group of tragically oppressed people in a particular time in the United States, who didn't get to attend Juilliard or the like, or eat most days. You know, it's part of the Afro-Cuban tradition that created jazz, which has its roots in the African-American community in the United States. Old European and Euro-descent men only wish they knew something about it, which is why they tried to imitate it (Ravel a conservatory drop-out btw, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Gershwin...)The only one who kinda succeeded in reaching back into that ethos from his Juillard practice room was Miles Davis-- and he dropped out too, btw) rich kidz at Juilliard, eastman, the New Scool, and other conservatory jazz programs spend their life trying to understand what it means to be that oppressed. I know, I've heard hours of blues, or should I say "blues" played by the white children of the rich. Beethoven and Richter don't get it. And schoenberg doesn't either. Frankly, very few educators at conservatory have any idea how to teach musicians. That is because they are supposed to get out of the way and help them teach themselves. This rarely happens, because artistry doesn't have a path. It finds its own- conservatory pretends there is a path, which brings us to where we are now with homogenized music. is there something that can be gained here with respect to programming artistic development? I think so, it just seems that the field is so insular and mono culture (just like classical music and jazz) that it can't learn from other pedagogical and culture mistakes the arts have already made. Namely, there is no "path". Thatmight help. but definitely check out Brushy One String. He is a modern blues guy who gets it-- again, hes from an impoverished island background not unlike the Mississippi Delta back in the day-- no Beethoven and Richter for him-- just poverty, drugs, crime, and oppression.