The Multifaceted Nature of Music: Skill and Essence
Music exists in a beautiful duality – both as a refined skill and as a fundamental expression of human experience. Let’s explore how these perspectives can coexist and complement each other.
Implementing
– Honoring both structured learning and intuitive exploration
– Recognizing paths to fluency in musical expression are unique to the human
– Valuing technical skill for the ease and function, and freedom it offers
– Creating learning environments that find a balance: integrating technical instruction with emotional expression and intuitive exploration
Music, in its fullest sense, is both a skill to be cultivated and a living language that holds the human experience within its melodic tapestries. It invites us to engage through careful study and spontaneous feeling, through intellectual understanding and pure, unfiltered expression. It is also action and response, question, contemplation, request and reflection, and the telling of a tale, whether epic or subtle & ethereal.
Conventional Musical Understanding
In the traditional view, music is indeed a skill that can be meticulously learned, practiced, and mastered.
– Technical proficiency
– Structured learning
– Musical theory
– Instrumental technique
– Academic musical education
Music as Living Vibration
Simultaneously, music transcends its technical dimensions, existing as a fundamental mode of human expression and universal connection.
– Musical ability is innate to human experience
– Vibration and rhythm are inherent to existence
– Musical expression requires some level of fluency in the language
– Every human has an intrinsic musical capacity
Conventional: Skill & Compliance
Music is indeed a skill that can be meticulously learned, practiced, and mastered
– Technical Proficiency Before Integration
– Measured by Precision/Replication
– Validated through Judgement
– Predetermined Structure & Form
– Demands Cultural and Format Consistency
– Expects Instrumental Mastery
– Academic Comprehension; Contrived Curriculum
Fluency
Music can transcend its technical dimensions, existing as a fundamental mode of human expression and universal connection
– Music is innate to the human experience; universally comprehended
– Musical expression can emerge organically, and when used to authentically connect and express, can bridge across time and space
– Vibration and rhythm are inherent to existence
– Communication and expression is integral to the human existence
– Intuitive Exploration: every human has an intrinsic capacity to understand and create musically, in whatever form is natural to them
The Complementary Nature of Musical Experience: Bridging Perspectives & Approach
As each perspective represents different entry points to understanding music’s profound role in human communication, we can create a bridge that brings fullness in the joining of both.
Structure, precision, and historical context are key aspects of the technical, skill driven concept of music as something we do. While understanding music as a way of capturing and expressing, of communicating the human experience, reconnects us with music’s core vibrational essence, thus offering a conduit for our own interconnectedness. If we recognize music as energy’s voice, we can also then deeply value the investment of our energy in refining how we sculpt and weave our existence into the harmonic sequences we create, and pass on through the generations.