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Matthew Meloney

September 30th, 2011

Matthew Meloney

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Creating for Yourself

August 13th, 2011

There’s a difference between writing music or creating a work of art for yourself and doing it for the pleasure of others.

One gives you complete freedom and pleasure while the other makes you an absolute slave.

-sLiLT-

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This past few months over the summer I have had a lot of time to do absolutely nothing. No practicing, no writing, barely anything that had to do with music. It was a complete vacation from the massive amounts of music I had been immersed into over the past few semesters.

It was all about relaxation.

Over this time I have thought about a lot of things. What I’ve learned about myself completely worth’s itself of the “doing nothing” that I’ve been immersed in.

One thing of big importance I learned is how to listen to music.

My past few years in college I’ve been trained to listen to music very analytically. I was trained this way through composition classes teaching me how to shape lines, listening for contours and dynamics as well as the progressions, choice of pitches, etc. And in piano instruction, I was taught how to shape these musical lines and make them smooth, rising and falling with complete ease and perfection.

My mind was all technical about music.

A few days ago, after doing nothing, I listened to music and really enjoyed it. It wasn’t anything “too complex” or atonal modern music. It wasn’t even a piece that most professors of music would praise. It was just Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, a good piece but not considered a “masterpiece”.

However, listening to it I completely enjoyed everything about it. And just enjoyed the compositional aspects and changes in the music without analyzing them.I just listened. And it was great.

This is the way I think music was written to be. Not to be analyzed, not to be torn apart. But made to be listened to. With ears fully opened and hearing every detail and just that. Not placing words, concepts, or any ideas into the music that is happening. Just listening to it.

One thing I think that has prevented me from enjoying music so much was being a composition major. As a composition major you listen to lots of music. Lots of music written by great composers. It is what the professors tell you to do. They say to listen to music and study as many scores as you can possible get your hands on!

The problem with this is that when you look at all these scores and your motive is “I have to look at this score so I can get better at writing my own pieces”, you lose what the music was written for. Your ulterior motive to listening then takes over all of your musical listening experiences. If you hear a popular track by a hip hop artist you can’t tolerate the simplistic and cliche musical development. For the most part, the compositional skills in these tracks are basic. As a result, you don’t want to listen to it as it adds no value to your goal of improving your own compositional abilities. This makes it very difficult to just listen to music for the sole purpose of listening to music.

Having learned so many things about music out, I feel that it makes me listen clearer and with great focus on all the details. So, yes learning the whole “music language” and all that technical stuff does help me appreciate music better. But what I’ve learned is that you have to learn all these techniques and then forget them. Or else you’ll never enjoy music the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

In a way, it’s like zen. You learn all the skills to meditate (learning music theory, composition, etc) and then once you’ve learned enough you focus on just the meditating (music). In a way, you graduate from being a student of zen (music) and move to the ranks of being enlightened (a true musician, not a student).

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Shark Week 2011 – Watch Sharks

August 1st, 2011

With Shark week 2011 finally here it’s time to celebrate. Grab your bag of popcorn, stake your most comfortable chair, and get ready to do absolutely nothing for a week but watch and learn about the amazing, mystical creature called a “shark”.

s.L.i.L.T.

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