Exploring the Intersection of Sound and Self

The value of practice. Most people believe practicing your instrument is about being perfect. Every year thousands of people embark on the journey towards perfection, working to achieve a certain standard of excellence on their instrument. The goal, to perform a piece of music without flaw or blemish.

The trouble with that journey is the presupposition of a single path. That there’s only one right way. Perfection fills our heads with the belief that music is dead and sterile, and that we are bound to the great composers before us, to echo their efforts, and reach for their standards…

But music isn’t dead, sterile or ridged. It’s fluid, and vast. At MUSIC LIFE we believe that music is inviting, like an ocean of expression waiting to envelope you. You can stay shore bound, occasionally dipping your toes in, and the shallows of enjoyment will still be profound… but it’s not until you immerse yourself fully in the cold currents that you recognize the power and magnitude of the ocean.

Music, like the Ocean, invites us all. Not to swim perfectly like the master swimmers before us, but to learn the fluid relationship that exists between the swell and ourselves.

We immerse ourselves in our craft, technique, scales, timing… but our end goal is not to arrive at perfection. Rather, we study our craft to know the choices that lay ahead of us. To search out all the options. By rehearsing, we train our bodies to memorize the changing tides, to anticipate the coming rise and fall, so that when we meet those moments of decision in our playing, in our performing, and in our lives that we are experts in making our choice. That we move fluidly through the currents of life with the knowledge that we’ve put our time in. We know how to choose at a moments notice, so that no matter where the rising squall decides to go, we will be ready to respond.

Life is not a concert hall, and our crowning moment is not waiting on the other side of an ovation. It is the small, intentional choices that we make every day in the midst of challenges and heartache. Our world is hungry for a new voice, not the precise resuscitation of an old composers dream. Now, more than ever we need brave musicians who are rehearsed in craft of making choices. Expressing new thoughts. Composing new songs, dreaming new dreams.