Part 13
6 July 1997
In 900 Minutes, YOU Can Be Composing Very Fine Music in
Your Own Genre
Even though recent Winsights columns have been very
strongly into science and technology, the arts are virtually as crucial in
our concern for improving human ability, performance, and well being.
Today's example presents the little-known fact that you, or virtually
anyone, can become a highly original composer of really fine music. --Your
preferred type of music, though this writer is steeped in the classical.
Whether you play an instrument with any skill whatever, or are just a
bathtub singer, the same principles hold.
All you need do to find yourself composing astonishingly
good music, is to set up a tape recorder where you will be attempting to
create music, and to follow the simple 900 minute self-training program we
call "Improvitaping."
Yes, this simple 900-minute program does involve
improvising, but even the narrowly formally classically trained can do as
we describe below and your payoff will utterly astonish you. But unlike
improv jazz and improv in other branches of music, you do not build up
routines. In fact, any time you find yourself playing familiar themes or
anything you recognize, you change away from it and let the feedback
system we've designed do its integrations at a deeper level
instead.
In only 900 minutes, you will be creating entire fine
pieces of music, in your own preferred genre, highly original, and in
their own elegant form without your ever having had to wrestle with
composition formalities or other music theory. Just do the following
simple 900 minute self-training, and feedback and your own brain will take
care of the rest. Here is this simple 900-minute self-training program,
180 minutes total per day for 10 days:
The Improvitape Technique---
1. Simply play your chosen instrument (or bathtub-sing!)
for a half hour per day while recording on blank tape. Try to make it
sound like a "real" piece, keep going for a half hour per
day....
2. In so doing, steer away from recognized themes and
patterns. Keep on doodling for that half-hour per day, trying to make it
sound like "a real piece."
3. --And then the hardest part! --Play back the tapes
you make, for an hour per day. --A half hour while paying attention to
the contents; the other half hour as background while you are doing
other things.
--As simply as that! Within 10 days, doing this
at-least-90-minute-per-day program, as you run this simple
flow-with-feedback process, you will be amazed to discover:
- How much of what doesn't work drops out;
- How much of what bores the ear drops out; and
- How much of what does work reinforces up into good new
pieces of music!
It's probably 'wince-and-groan' for you at
first....
You will likely experience going through these three
distinct stages, during your 900-minute evolution into becoming a good,
original composer:
1. Wince-and-groan Stage, while you are playing back the
first tapes of your improvisations. Bear with it--this is the hardest
part right there, and it lasts only for the first 3-5 days. You won't
believe how quickly you move on into the stages of pleasant
surprises.....
2. Mining Melodies: good thematic material and figures
will start surprising you, showing up here and there in your taped
improvisations. You can "mine" this increasingly high-grade "ore" to
extract from these tapes these instance of good original melodies,
motifs and patterns. Even if you did not take the Improvitape Technique
any further than this, you could use these good original themes for
pieces which you then compose conventionally. But if you continue this
Improvitaping program for 3 to 6 days further, you reach---
3. The Stage of Elegant Whole Pieces: the music flows,
following its own intrinsic logic, developing its own form, and your
improvitapes emerge as complete original compositions. Finer and finer
works emerge from this flow, each of them a rich surprise. At times
while playing, you won't know that anything special is happening until
afterward, when you are playing the tapes back and sit in stunned
disbelief that l'il ol' you could possibly have come up with such a
wonderful thing. Real hair-raising at times! --And nothing else quite so
extraordinarily rewarding as this experience, which - if you continue
Improvitaping - will occur for you again and again and again with
different wonderful pieces each time.
From that point on, most musicians who have done this
simple 900-minute program, over 10 days, will find themselves generating a
mixture of Stage Two (Mines) and Stage Three (whole pieces) tapes. Expect
a variety of valid musical forms and, increasingly, instances of
breathtaking elegance.
I challenge you to do this simple 900 minutes without
getting at least these high-level results!
I know it doesn't seem fair - the above Improvitape
Technique in composing music, or our hundreds of other techniques for
improving various areas of human ability, performance and well being, when
so many people have by more formal training labored so hard for such
results as they are getting now or are not getting now! I am reminded of
how a certain unnamed major university, with whom I had arranged an
intelligence-building study which had been about to go to catalog,
suddenly had fierce objections and an overrule from unnamed sources
within. One quote which got back to me was: "You can't increase human
intelligence and, furthermore, you can't increase it HERE!"
Well, this one you can do here, or there, or wherever you
please, on your own and no one to overrule you. And as is the case with
each of the techniques we've offered here in "winsights," you can
reasonably infer with the results you get from this one what the likely
verity of the other ones must be. So we invite you: make this simple
900-minute experiment and, while judging therefrom the verity of results
of our procedures and something of the huge human stakes riding with them,
enjoy harmlessly your own creation in a highest-quality experience wholly
beyond any you could normally expect to get elsewhere - and enjoy it for a
rich full lifetime!
Listen to an excerpt from a Win Wenger improv number! Click here.
|
Just for fun, Google for "Improvitaping" and see
what others report, in over 170 links.
|
|