Those Who Teach, Learn

I am now giving a lesson on piano and composition once a week. Teaching has always been one of my favorite ways to learn and it will be cool to try to really explain composition concepts that have been mostly intuitive and born out of the moment for me. No lesson today as it is the long easter weekend.

Underlying all of my musical philosophy is the concept that music is ultimately about creating and releasing tension - for example, the resolving of a chord progression - and that this principle underlies all dimensions of music: from the movement of one note to another and one beat onto the next to entire pieces of music, such as a song or a symphony. Also, the actual characteristics of the sound the instrument play a critical part as well.

As a composer or a performer, you cannot just drop your listeners along their ride and hope to pick them back up again when you wish. I believe that it is most critical to develop a sensitivity to this flow of tension throughout the music; a flow that is very akin to a trajectory such that, when either composing or performing, the very first notes set the initial course of the creative expression. This is not unique to music - the first strokes of the painter's brush, the first line's of an actor or the first words of a writer all shape their subsequent expression.