Drake composed his first original tune last night. It isn't bad!
It is interesting to me that I have just discovered that I have this skill but didn't ever know it, and I have no idea whether the reason I didn't know it was that I assumed I couldn't. I assumed that that was something 'other people do,' so I never tried.
The only thing that gave me a partial clue was that my brother is good at it. I am not as good as he is but I am much better than I ever suspected in my wildest dreams. My ward is doing one of my pieces in the Christmas Sacrament Meeting this year, so that will be exciting.
Hopefully encouraging my kids from a young age will help them develop the ability if they indeed got it from me, but the older I get the more I suspect that that child prodigy assumption--that either someone is good at something from a very young age or they don't have a chance at all--is not as true as we think. My parents did encourage my music very enthusiastically so it is possible that I did have relevant early training and it is still evolving, but the point is that whatever component that judging from my own abilities and those of my immediate family IS somewhat genetic are actually still evolving. The fact that I never thought of actually composing in my childhood or teens is maybe somewhat limiting but not definitive.
I have been impressed that Stephanie, for instance, has taught herself piano so she could teach it to her kids. No reason why not, and I think it makes a lot of sense to do that. Actually now that I think of it I am not exactly sure if she knew how or not but I know she has been polishing her skills and she wasn't too sure of her ability of a music teacher. I was actually inspired from her example. I had tons of music training and have lots of current skill but I didn't think I could teach my own kids. Because she has done it I tried and it is going fine. They are probably learning almost as much as they would from an experienced piano teacher, and my guess is they are learning about as much as they will eventually retain.
However she said the other night that she thinks her skills are more in line with art/drawing, and that she was sorry she hadn't been trained as a child. I think obviously she should go for it! IMO the whole child training assumption limits what skills adults think they can pick up, so maybe that compounds the evidence that we think we then see for the necessity of childhood exposure.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Lame to comment on my own blog. Oh well.
Supporting what I said was that when my younger brother and I were growing up I was the one that was always very involved in music--he was but you know the whole thing about being a boy vs. girl and he was of course also good at boy things and on the football team, etc.
Now I am quite sure he has passed me up, because I am not sure that the relevant factor is how much someone was exposed to musical training in their youth.
One thing I've enjoyed being a stay at home Mom is that I have time to choose something that is new to me that I did not do as a child. I was very much immersed in the whole dance thing (not a bad thing)but now I get to experiment and broaden myself. Some things I do so I can pass the skill on to my kids and some things I do just for my own enjoyment.
Stephanie sent me this when I was starting up my blog and I thought you might like to look through it to help with your own blog questions
http://www.tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/
FWIW, it seems people comment on their own blogs all the time and no one thinks it is lame. I did, however, get a bit of grief when I complimented my own post in my comment once.
Something else I've been doing lately is learning how to sing parts. I had the same kind of issue where I assumed I just couldn't do it. Now that I've changed my attitude I can actually hear the alto part a lot of times. I still have work to do, but is is fun learning.
PS I did have 10 years of piano lessons, but it has now been a good 12 years since I regularly played. That takes alot of polishing :)
I am fascinated by the ability to come up with a new tune, mostly because any and all attempts I've made ended in me realizing it was the same as something else I've heard. For some reason I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that there can even be new ones - except that obviously people write songs all the time. I remember talking to some college friends who were studying music, and based on remembered fragments of those conversations, I wonder if some additional music theory would open my eyes to this world. When I attended concerts with one friend, he clearly understood the structure behind what he was hearing, where to me it was just pretty notes. Add it to the list of things I would like to learn about...
Stephanie, sorry if I thought you hadn't had piano I just don't think I have heard or heard OF you playing.
But my main point was that that I myself had previously assumed that because I hadn't taught piano to anyone (even though my music background is fairly active and extensive and I had even taught flute lessons) that I would need to find my kids a piano teacher.
I was planning to do that for a few years now but I had had some frustration of my plans so I never got around to it. When I saw that you were deciding to prep yourself so that you could teach your own kids I ditched that assumption and gave it a shot. So I was glad to have the example.
I think SMB is Sarah?
I think the reason that I have found some amount of composing ability (or at least arranging) is that I in general am a fairly nonconventional thinker. I am able, or at least value and therefore very often try and sometimes succeed, in starting from scratch in many ways rather than going through pathways I have already been exposed to.
This helps me to not end up stumbling across melodies I have been exposed to, I think.
This has upsides and downsides for me personally and thus I can argue that I am not bragging--I am not really sure it is a good thing for me even overall. You would think from what people say about valuing creativity and creative thinking that any degree to which I do this is good, but I think this is another case where people theoretically value one thing and socially reward the opposite (my post on insincerity vs. malice mentions this).
Of course I do see the upsides and thus I probably chose this way of thinking when I was younger and more idealistic. Obviously more of it would be somewhat helpful to combat the obvious problem that that 90% of 'conventional wisdom' type thinking has major flaws, some of it is even dangerous or destructive. And because there is so much of it it is sadly more practical to make use of it instead of cutting from whole cloth when attacking a topic, thus a spiral situation.
But among the bad consequences (some practical ones but less important overall to my life) are that socially, even when those I am talking to don't exactly find a particular reason to disagree, meaning my argument could be completely consistent with what they think already, I continue to be shocked at how negatively people react to things I say that sound like something completely different from anything else they have heard before.
(And keeping the music analogy, even a tune that ends up being widely liked often needs to be heard over and over to be even given a chance by potential listeners, Slade is very much that way. He has no sense on first hearing music whether he likes it or not at all, and I usually have one reaction or other even at first).
I can't count the number of times I have heard 'Carol--I have NEVER heard that before!' in a semi-hostile comment that is intended to pass for a rebuttal, even when whatever I said in the discussion is fairly demonstrable.
Thanks for whoever stimulated my thinking about this because it may be very key about my brain. I obviously have several brain abnormalities, I performed beautiful ones during my EEG's, along with just regularly abnormal ongoing features such as amplitude and sharpness of the brain wave conours, widely varying frequencies, etc.
Sometimes I wonder whether this renders me incapable of being normal in a way. People are always saying things about my verbal output even when they can't call it wrong EXACTLY: 'you say things that people just don't say,' etc.
Mostly I have suffered for it. I am trying lately to improve my writing for public consumption and my music because I think they are both ways that I can do something with my tendency to do things that people don't 'recognize.'
And also, back to the kids, I am very much hoping that they can avoid my extremity and my physical issues (the whole idiot savant thing is mostly the life of an idiot) and just build on normal talents. I hope they are Beethovens like their dad and not Mozarts.
Post a Comment