[music and the absurd]
one must imagine the musician happy, or, something..
[back]
[written 20 March, 2024]
To preface, this is merely self-reflection. I do not expect this to make any objective sense, as these are things that I have mostly been telling myself. I simply wish to put these words out of my head and into something else so I can refer to them later.
Making music is something that I would hope many composers enjoy doing; however, something I believe that plagues the most of us is art block, lack of motivation, lack of inspiration, or even lack of appreciation from our musical output.
We study, we listen, we practice, we write, and then we play; but it never feels like we reach anywhere with any new breakthrough. We stay in this habit and don’t notice any recent changes until after a long stretch of time passes by. Musical progress always seems to be a hard counter to the recency bias, where we never notice anything notable until significant historical progression has passed.
This I consider to be the absurdity of practicing music, but one that I try to embrace whenever I sit down to work on anything musically related.
This is because it gets easily infuriating when I don’t notice any forward progress at the moment, and the sooner that I can internalize that said progress will not be noticable immediately, it seems to get a little easier to go forward and practice, or write, or what-have-you.
Stay determined! Creative progress hates the recency bias, take advantage of that.