Environment

While posture represents an actual benefit of playing a musical instrument, fostering an awareness of the environment that evolves while engaged in instrumental music performance approaches the realm of visionary possibilities in application of playing a musical instrument. One could make the argument that playing a musical instrument simultaneously engages a rigorous integration of learning, openness, versatility and empathy. For me, the melding of these domains forms an organically electromagnetic l-o-v-e paradigm. By extension, through knowledgeable application of this paradigm, one can create a shift in the model from one perception of actuality, to another viewpoint of reality.

The American art form of the blues provides us with an example for such a model. For many years, blues was recorded only by memory, and relayed only live and in person. This transmission of learning, influenced by aboriginal roots, field hollers, ballads, church music and dance tunes, would evolve into a repeating pattern of 8,12 or 16 measures of music that we define as blues. In this music, a singer would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. The path of that learning evolution crosses the dimensions of openness, versatility and empathy.

If we think of openness more in terms of a promise…a promise to do one’s best to treat everyone fairly; a promise to do one’s best to be kind to everyone, even if they are not like you; then, one develops versatility in order to create the motion (organic electromagnetic regeneration) necessary to honor the promise. In the blues, this promise is a story, a history, an epic memory, that is moved from one generation to the next through the environment of empathy. Contained in that epic memory, is the original promise of everyone’s inherent worth in the eyes of the universe…an abstract form of balancing the equation…a form of perfect sharing.