Staying Flexible

After looking back at everything I’ve written in the past 8 weeks or so, I’ve come to realize something: I’m not very good at sticking to an agenda. When I first sat down to create an agenda for the future based on the ideas from the Goodchord workshop, I had decided to focus on triads for a year, thinking horizontally, thinking in terms of a bunch of independent chord shapes, thinking harmonically. Very quickly though my interest became melodic, became vertical, and my mind began to wander into other territory harmonically. I still I think I can spend at least a year working on triads. After nearly two months, I can do the 4 patterns on only two modes out of the minimum of 10 or 12 I’ll need to learn them in for practical purposes. But I’m not where I set out to be. And that’s a great thing.

It’s happened to me when using the reference material of other authors and teachers that one of their ideas might inspire a concept or sound for me to pursue that was only indirectly related to their material. But I find this especially interesting now, as I try to create a body of reference material and interact with it as a practicing musician simultaneously.

Setting out to do one thing and accomplishing another is one of the beautiful things about playing music and one of the reasons we should never stop discovering things and growing as we practice. It was a nice idea to think of a hundred different variations on the triad exercise, or the nested serial intervallic sequences or whatever you want to call them (see “Oh Boy...” or “Spread it Around a.k.a. Serial Soloing”), but what good would it actually do me or anybody else reading those ideas to get totally bogged down in them and let them eclipse the kind of creative and fruitful, discovery oriented practice that we can and should all be doing more of. In five years, when I’ve mastered the triads and can play them to pieces and am looking for a warm up exercise that can also be a brainteaser, then maybe I’ll go back and look at some of that stuff. But in the meantime, the best thing I can do is to let go of that material, and not feel compelled or committed to sticking with it, even though I made it up with every intention of doing so.

And as for the horizontal triads, it turns out I don’t really even like them all that much (right now, at least), so why allow stubbornness to stifle me? In the end of the day, music should be an enjoyable activity and you don’t win any points for being right or wrong. I think we get preoccupied with being able to do things that are supposed to be really hard and being better than other people (you know it happens sometimes, it’s okay), instead of being focused on being creative and connecting with others in a meaningful way.

So let loose, don’t be stubborn, let the music flow, commit to the material that ignites your passion (tough luck if it happens to be material that takes a lot of prep-work) and don’t be afraid to change directions, keep it simple, be “bad” according to the person with the self-inflated ego trying to label you, and stay true to yourself.