Ottmar Liebert
Music, Performance, Recording, the Business of Music, Traveling, Life, Art + unrelated subjects!

 


Thursday, 22 April 2004
 

Hi friends and readers... Happy Earth Day!

Today is the last day to enter the Coral Park Buddy Raffle. Together with Ottmar, we've raised over $700 to help protect coral reefs in Bonaire. I wanted to let you know how special this fundraiser is to me and the folks at the Bonaire Marine Park and to encourage you all to enter the raffle today. Tickets are only $10. Don't want to send in a check? You can always PayPal me and I'll be sure you are entered into the drawing. This is an easy, effective way to participate in Earth Day and help protect our oceans.

http://coralreefreport.info/raffle/

More about Bonaire and the raffle:
The island of Bonaire is part of the Netherlands Antilles, located approximately 80 km off of the Venezuelan coast in the southern Caribbean. The Bonaire National Marine Park was founded in 1979 to protect and preserve the island's marine resources, particularly the magnificent coral reefs. A small staff of rangers and volunteers deal with over 70,000 visitors each year, maintaining public moorings to protect the reefs, providing information to visitors and locals alike, and conducting research studies that monitor the impact of recreational activities.

100% of your $10 donation (US Dollars) will help fund the development of a training course for these dedicated people, which will include increasing their knowledge of the coral reef ecosystems, training in media relations, and community outreach improvement.

Thanks for your help!
Donovan Watts
Coral Reef Report

http://coralreefreport.info/

[iceplant radio]

2:25:16 PM    comment [];

Mind over muscle?

It seems to me that the biggest value of practicing one's instrument is not in the building of muscle in your hands, but rather in creating and deepening neural pathways.

It is fairly well known that doing something over and over deepens the paths in our brain and improves the signal flow. Ideally it allows information to flow directly and less consciously. What I mean is that a melody will flow from my imagination instead of from my thoughts. I would distinguish between the two by considering imagination a free-flow of association and thought a conscious exercise. Or, the first follows the musical inspiration and the second follows the scales one knows to belong to that set of chords.....

Ideally a musician wants to become a conduit for music and many musicians have described the feeling of music flowing through them. Practicing makes that possible, because it allows the mind to get out of the way.

I have also noticed that there is some form of accumulative practice value in that I can now do things better than I could do them years ago, even if I haven't practiced as much...as if those neural pathways can stay engaged...

Polishing the neural pathways is really what we are after when we practice...

I found this when searching for "muscle memory":

But after a while, the "seeing-thinking-doing" gradually becomes "seeing-doing" because your muscles seem to "know" and "remember" just what to do. What you're learning now is speed, i.e. how to perform the task carefully and quickly. That's muscle memory.

2:18:57 PM    comment [];

Melodies, Rorschach, Aging.....
Melodies are free associations over a Rorschach Test in the form of chords.

As I get older, more associations become available over each set of chord changes. The resulting melodies may become simpler, or more complex, or simply more diverse.

Anything I ever dumped into my mind, any image or smell or feeling that moved across the neural tracks of my brain can come forth suddenly, released by a certain chord change or a certain rhythm. Sometimes I don't know what happened until weeks or months or even years later.

Becoming older creates more layers and I think that is exciting.
1:37:27 PM    comment [];

I have at last started reading "Quicksilver", the first of three volumes in Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle". Almost a thousand pages each...enough to easily last me through all touring this year...

The title link leads to Stephenson's Metaweb for Quicksilver. He writes
Superficially, this site looks like a set of FAQs about a novel that I wrote entitled QUICKSILVER. As time goes on, we hope that it will develop into something a little more than that. We don't know how it will come out. It's an experiment.

Why put the information on such a complicated system, when a simple FAQ is easier? Because we are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel.

Oh, I forgot, it's great reading, although there is a lot to keep track of, in typical Stephenson fashion....
1:23:37 PM    comment [];


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