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Attaining Personal Growth

  • My philosophy about personal musical growth is that musicians should learn
  • how to think, listen and talk about music. Criteria: brain, ears, and voice.
  • Naturally, these three are interrelated. If you think about music, then it
  • follows that you can easily talk about it. Listening is the most important
  • part. Without ears, music would not exist. If I had to pick the most
  • valuable musical tool for shaping musical growth, it would be personal
  • taste. Although we all possess it, personal taste can get buried; getting
  • lost in the vast sea of technical skills, streams of theoretical data,
  • dogmatic instruction, and competition, to name a few. These obstacles can
  • strip away the very thing that lured us into music: the music itself. A
  • student once asked me if a particular note "worked" in a particular setting;
  • my response was, "only if you like it". Why are people continually amazed
  • by the notion that someone could be actually self taught? Who wrote the
  • first musical theory books? What made them experts?
  • Simple: they listened and learned. They experimented, listened, and learned
  • some more. Their taste paving the way. Personal musical taste expands
  • infinitely. This allows for musical evolution. It is an ongoing process both
  • personal and global.
  • Don't fret about not getting there. You are already there (here), so don't
  • question it. Just live it. Go for it. Play it. Write it. Above all, use your
  • own personal, ever growing, musical taste.
  • Hence, music is the real teacher... if you listen.
  • Steve Giordano