Thank you, Peter!!!
Yep, you practice a lot, you get better, playing becomes more and more
natural, less and less something outside yourself.
Sometimes breathing into a bamboo tube becomes as natural as breathing
in the open air, which makes all the right effort worth it.
Sometimes that's alone in a quiet room with incense going, sometimes
it's shared with an audience in a concert hall or bar.
But sometimes it's just work, wood-shedding, perfecting a technique or a
pitch or a difficult phrase. I don't think the hard work ever goes away.
Even if you consider honkyoku liturgical music: liturgical musicians
throughout history, from meistersingers to Tibetan monks, have practiced
their techniques arduously and applied their intellect to the
difficulties of the music itself rather than an endlessly unfolding
origami of meta-discussion.
I join the old-timer chorus in saying I really don't think there's a
whole lot more (or less) to it. Everyone wants to be cool, but if you
look from a little bit of distance we're not that different from the kid
who lugged his accordion to school because he had a lesson right
afterwards. Maybe as adults we can see that's not really uncool at all.
I think the simple and difficult practice of music is IN ITSELF, without
the need for any other "spiritual" trappings, a beautiful balance to
this world of greed, violence, and shame.
Peter Ross wrote:
>
> We just spent hours, weeks, months, years and decades blowing air into
> our flutes. We didn't get hung up about whether the...
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