Philosophical rant because I need one.
I've ignored the entire reason that I got into music in the first place- the act of speaking through the music.
First, let me introduce you to the background knowledge.
My teacher consistently talks about changing my self- image. I mostly just accept this because I already tried the whole contend with it and decided that he intends what he means but I just don't have the right thought to really understand the meaning. This is something that has been consistent from day one. In the meantime, he says I sound like a completely different player from when I first came in (yay!).
I started reading that book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." When I first started reading it, I thought it was interesting (you'll note that my last entry was a quotes entry from the book. I've since finished it). As I read, I realized that a lot of the things my teacher was saying matched up with what this book was saying- aha- a light into the dark mind of professor Sloane. Has he read this book? I don't know. He's a little too obsessive to really read anything that remotely relates to either motorcycles or buddhism so I really doubt it (the guy took an overnight train to Paris so that he could go to the Vandoren reed factory.... I mean, come one). I've been fighting with this book, trying to understand it- well not fighting, but definitely preoccupied because I saw that it was a thought process I hadn't even glanced at before. Then I finished it.
Here is a very linear thought process that is only linear because I have had a chance to talk it through.
The main premise of the book is quality- an undefinable characteristic of everything. In fact, he requires that we change our definition so that quality isn't contained within everything but that everything is contained within quality. The mind and the object are separate, but are illuminated to one another by quality- thus without quality neither the mind nor the objects it perceives would be "real."
*Slight aside*
I kind of like this change- it's very spiritual, but not in the dogmatic "Thou must obey me" kind of way. It's kind of the way I'd like things to be, a sense of faith and spirituality without the overbearing one truth that always seems to accompany it (Enough of the aside, I get it already).
To continue; reality is quality that moderates the interaction of two things. In his analogy of motorcycle maintenance, you can change your own quality and the quality of something else through care. Care is the perception of this quality, and a feeling of association with the work. This association with the work can be derived from another part of the philosophy from the Sophists known as arete- excellence. Today we translate it as virtue, and in some sense it it. The rough translation (as previously stated) is excellence, but it also means an acceptance and appreciation of the one-ness of life. It is a rejection of specialization, and a hatred of efficiency as the main part of life. Care means that we go through the hard times, it means that we find a way through it all. Care also leads to gumption- the drive to do the job. Without care there is no drive, unless you mean from external forces. But it is the internal forces that yield the highest quality, even if it isn't the most technical work. It is through this shaping that you create art- art can therefore be anything which shapes quality. Hence why motorcycle maintenance is art.
This is the final part of the puzzle. There's more to it than this. There's out entire mode of thought- a thought that requires dualities and promotes achieving mind over matter. That isn't it at all. It is mind at one with matter- the mutual shaping that causes gumption. That is- to me- the important part.
Arete also has a personal affiliation. This is the virtue part of it. The drive to achieve the outcome is directed towards someone. With arete that someone is you, as egotistical as that sounds. Your honor, your virtue, your voice, your beliefs, your quality. It is very individualized. I will practice because I want to shape my voice in the music this way, or I will write so that I can try to find the right words. To that end, it can achieve the same results as the dichotomous way. The man will still go off to war because he takes pride in defending his friends and family- the work has a high level of quality to him.
The shift in thinking isn't to come up with different results. Rather, it's to show that there's another frame of reference in which to achieve these same results. A view point that may be more satisfying- that maybe if we try to take our dull repetitive job and create a sort of art and begin to care about it then we might be happier. That we wouldn't seek the stimulation of so many other things.
This is what my teacher was talking about. Somewhere in here is the kernal of ideas that he was talking about. In fact, it might be the whole shift in thinking. The shift from being someone who does music for a major to being someone who does music for a career. The entire shift of ideas that it's no longer about the jury, or the recital, or the the audition because there will always be another one after that. There's no failing out of life, only of misattempts and second chances until YOU decide otherwise. That type of ownership is something you can't get when you call music a vocation. It's something that requires a copernican shift (if you don't really remember what copernicus did then ask, I still remember my notes from scientific revolutions).
And that's where I'm at. Trying to shift from being a student and needing to practice for a grade and being a professional and needing to practice to consistently develop my own musical voice.