Going back to my roots

Sometimes we need to take a step back in order to move forward. Or so said my teaches back in high school. That's what I have been doing lately and after a lot of thinking and a couple of live gigs I think I might have actually found a sound. At least for the moment. I kind of found it going back to my roots. 

The music that always inspired me the most even before I picked up the guitar was the music of Govi. I had no idea who he was but I loved the music. The pleasant blend of latin rhythms mixed with romantic melodic phrases and the occasional pan flute just left me in awe. I remember trying to figure out which genre of music it was and learning that is was called 'World' or 'New Age'. Since then that familiar sound has stuck with me and I have always been able to pick out other New Age artists. So is New Age my sound? Well yes and no. I want to be able to create that atmosphere that Govi created for me. Somewhat 'spanishy' yet contemplative. A sound that has a latin feel yet somewhat atmospheric. Rich romantic melodies but also spiced up with a little jazz. I wouldn't even know what to call the style. It certainly would be a mix and I don't think it could solely be based on one style or genre. But I feel it is what I am going to stick to in terms of originals for now. 

We can often be so focussed on the future, or even the busy-ness of life in the present that we can forget where we came from and how we got here. Sometimes it's those moments between everything that we need to pause and reflect on the past. Reflection. That's another aspect I want my sound to have. As I said before 'contemplative'. I guess everything musician wants people to listen to their music and be taken to another place. To bring them into the writers mind. That is partially what I would want my music to create for others, yet I would also like to create a moment for people to reflect for themselves, on themselves. To give them a breathe of fresh air free from whatever else their lives had been consumed with. It's what I felt when I listened to Govi and it is my dream to do the same for you. 

Better get to work then ey....

See you next week.

JL

 

Simplicity

So when I'm not playing guitar, working, studying or wasting time on youtube I sometimes get my camera out with my very average 18-55mm lens and try to take a really nice photo. Most of the time I get caught up trying to make it fancy by adding all these effects and taking shots in very crowded areas to make the photo look busy and impressive; but it usually ends up being one that I am never happy with.

As with my music, when I am trying to create a melody or a 'solo' I am almost habitually inclined to try and make it complicated. Whether it be a complicated melody, a complicated solo, a complicated harmony, I always seem to try to make it 'hard' and often try in vain.  Why? Well I guess it's that juvenile concept I still have about making things look impressive, and if it's not fast and complicated, it's no good right? Slowly I have learned that often simplicity can be a lot nicer than over complication and a lot more effective. You need to give people time to breathe. To take in the music, the notes. As I mentioned in a blog earlier 'Less is More'. That's not to say that fast and complicated music isn't good, some of the greatest pieces of music are so hard I wouldn't even be able to play the first two bars. But creating a fast and 'hard' melody for the sake of being fast and 'difficult' definitely misses the point of a melody. Sometimes one simple idea is all it takes.

Like the in the photo I took above (yes I know the lighting and exposure could be better) what attracted me was the 3 simple colours of the flower, the glasses, and the flower's stem. The image hardly has any depth (actually it is rather flat), and there was nothing difficult about taking the actual photo. It's just three flowers. Yet there is definitely an aesthetic quality in it's simplicity. Actually when you think about it life is a whole lot nicer when it's simple. When you don't have to worry about work, studying, exams, how to pay rent etc. you can actually just sit back and appreciate things for what they are. And sometimes we still then try to make things complicated for ourselves. We think, 'well I am relaxed now I can go and buy something else to pay off', or 'I can work towards something else that I haven't done yet' meanwhile creating the whole complicated lifestyle we just got out of not too long ago. Now I don't know if that is necessarily a bad thing or not, you tell me, but I do know that making things complicated for the sake of being complicated ain't going to do you any favours.

However, the funny thing is that sometimes, we find that the simpler songs are harder to perform. How do you stand out amongst the crowd of people that have played this song a hundred times? How do you write a nice simple melody over the same three chords that everyone else uses? How do you take a really great photo of a flower than a thousand people on flikr have shot? And so on and so forth.


Turns out less not only is more, but more work too.


Besides my rant on all that contradictory stuff (simplicity not being simple after all) I had a gig which went well about a week ago. Performed Manuel De Falla's 'La Vida Breve' and Paulo Belinati's 'Jongo'. Was definitely sweating by the end of them. Got a couple of weddings coming up and a new video in about a week. As well as a new original this month so make sure you stayed posted.

If you haven't seen my latest video let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading,


JL

Competition

Apologies once again for the great delay in writing another blog. University exams crept up on me along with a whole bunch of other stuff. Anyway, Uni is done for the year which means more guitar!

I just uploaded Barrios' Vals 3 if you haven't seen it yet, it was one of the pieces that I did for the Classical Guitar Society of Victoria (CGSVhttp://www.melbourneguitar.com) competition last month. I also performed Phillip Houghton's 'The Ancients'. I was lucky enough to win my division which meant I got a workshop with Slava Grygorian.
I was pretty stoked about that. Got to meet him last Monday and we had a good chat (along with the winners from the other divisions). Unfortunately it wasn't a guitar masterclass (so I didn't get to play for him) but he gave some great insight into the industry and quite a few professional tips (also got a signed CD which is always nice).

So what next? Well.. I just found out the 2012 Adelaide International Guitar Festival is holding it's competition again next year in August. The audition round opens between the 2nd of January and 29th of February next year. We need to send in 3 recordings as our audition. Two Prescribed and one Free Choice. I have just started looking at the two prescribed pieces and well.. they ain't easy.
1) BWV 997 Sarabande by Bach
2) Dervish (2nd Movement) from Phillip Houghton's 'Stele'

Not sure what I would do for a free choice yet, but I have a few ideas floating around so wish me luck for that!

You might have seen the other channel I startedhttp://www.youtube.com/user/GlensideMusic, that one is just for something different. Not exclusively for guitar, but a channel for some fun collaboration. Should have another one on that channel up in a week or so.

As for my main guitar channel, I plan to put another two piece's up before I go overseas but also while I'm abroad I'll have plenty of time to record on my laptop so stay tuned throughout the summer (or winter if your on the other side of the world).

Just a quick update but I shall post again next week :)

Take it easy


Jesse


other channel I started

Been a while

Just had my exam yesterday and I guess I can’t complain how it went. Felt pretty good about how I played everything, there was the one wrong note but other than that, pretty smooth sailing. It’s taking a while to get the audio footage from the guitar festival so I am thinking to just put up another one of my exam pieces. After that next video should have another original up. Probably another duo kind of piece. I have two originals in mind that I’m thinking of uploading. One is a more upbeat and the other more contemplative. The upbeat one has a bit of a spanish feel to it as opposed to the more relaxed one where I have a classical and electric guitar kind of reciting a poem. Anyway stay tuned for those two and my next video.

So a part of my university degree requires me to do a an architecture unit and so if you’ve been wondering where i’ve been, it has been doing a ridiculous amount of drawings and sketches. I rather be playing guitar honestly but oh well. Such is life. Surprisingly though I have found the subject quite interesting, and as I do with most things I somehow find a way to relate it to music. The piece of architecture we have been looking at is the ‘Farnsworth house‘ by Mies Van de Rohe. It’s one of those ‘you don’t know the name, but you would have seen it before‘ buildings. I don’t plan on analyzing the building here (done enough of that already) but I am interested in the philosophy behind it. The principle is basically ‘Less is More’. To most people, it is just a glass box on a platform, with 8 columns holding it up, but like any great artist this architect has managed to make his master piece look effortless. It is so simple that it simply blends in with it’s surroundings. My understanding of architecture before hand was to fill up as much space as possible and to make the building as complex as one could. Same was my conception of music. I always tried to make songs complicated and technically difficult but overtime I began to see that making something hard for the sake of making something hard only takes away from the piece. In that case, more is less.

What this guy did was just to let the space be. He understands the utility of absence, of the void. He knows what will be used the most. Namely nothing. In a similar kind of way I have tried to adapt this into a musical context. We should appreciate the spaces between the notes as much as the notes themselves. Filling only what is necessary to the piece itself for it is the silence that gives birth to sound. This whole ideology reminds of a little bit of chinese philosophy my dad once told me when I was younger, I think it is quite appropriate to this scenario and definitely to musical composition.


‘We take and mould clay to form a bowl, yet is the space where there is nothing that the utility of the bowl depends.
We put bricks together to make a house, yet it is the space where there is nothing, that the utility of the house depends.
So just as we take advantage of what is, so should we recognize the utility of what is not.’

Might give it a try.

JL

Another Original

So i’ve finally got round to recording and filming another original. I should have it up tomorrow so keep checking back to see it. It is quite different to my first original as it isn’t just a solo work, but rather I’ve tried to add another dimension by trying to write for two instruments plus the backing instruments. It actually started out as a vocal song (Lazy Days) with lyrics, melody and all the works, but I decided that I’d like to create an instrumental version as sometimes the lyrics didn’t do the feeling justice and plus my youtube channel is really just guitar anyway and I wanted to stick to that. Although I might create another channel with a few people to do other stuff like that, so perhaps you’ll hear it one day. The melody of the electric guitar differs greatly from the original sung melody but I felt it needed to, in that without lyrics the guitar needs to find its own way to ‘sing’. The song is called lazy days for a reason, and that’s basically all its about. It actually started out as a Bossa Rhythm while I was playing around with some jazz chords, and eventually it kind of developed a verse chorus kind of form. I kinda just wrote down what I was feeling at the time and within 20 minutes I pretty much had the original vocal version and lyrics down. That was while I was in singapore actually. When I returned home, I wanted to add another dimension to the piece, to make sure the music would speak the same language as the original lyrics. I’ll post the original lyrics in the video if any of you are interested and let me know whether you get a similar feeling. 

So the dinner show is coming up as I have been talking about for the last few weeks and there has been some last minute changes. There is now going to be some opera, and some dancing as well to accompany the guitar which should be fun so hopefully I can get a recording of the performance too. There are so many other things which I am working on too so hopefully I can just get a lot of it down before Uni starts again. 

Keep checking this page for the link to the new video!

JL

Silence

So I've finally finished all things Uni but unfortunately for only another 3 weeks and then we're back on - so i'm trying to make the most of it. You should see my new original up soon which you might find quite different to other things I've put up but who knows you might like it. As some of you know I like to keep the variety fresh so hopefully this next one is. I'm also still in the midst of practising for this upcoming dinner show which is only 2 weeks away now. I find it's amazing how many pieces you can learn when you have a deadline, goes to show a little pressure doesn't hurt here and there.

I've often, when trying to compose music, and arrange other pieces always tried to fill the song up as much as I could being a soloist and all. I've always felt that the more there is to hear, the more interesting the piece will be to my audience. Lately though my perspective has changed a little. And it is kind of like (though not exactly) the 'if there was no suffering, there would be no joy' argument. Silence in piece of music is essentially the other half of the story. If there was no silence, all we would hear would be a continuous sound and it would cease to be to music. I think i remember John Williams saying that the 'spaces between the notes are just as important as the notes themselves.' I see this to be very true, in fact now when I practice I am paying even more attention to the voids in the work. To the silence between the sounds. And those two things in summation is what creates the beautiful thing we call music.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music  - Aldous Huxley

Visual Music

Architecture is the frozen music, music is the flowing architecture.

I actually found this quote on my other friend’s blog and thought there was something to it. When we listen to music we mainly listen to the melody, or perhaps the phrasing and harmonies. We spend little time concentrating on individual notes (unless we are learning a piece) and just let the melody flow. At the end of the song we generally have a good idea of the main tune and it kind of sticks in our heads, especially if we have enjoyed it. I’ve read somewhere in my studies that architecture, or a city (architecture on a larger scale) should invoke a similar kind of experience. As we walk, drive, or cycle through the city it shouldn’t resemble a bunch of fragmented buildings/structures, rather it should generate a kind of ‘melody’. A visual one. One that once you’ve left that area, you have a clear memory of that phrasing of architecture. It’s as if the buildings were connected together, flowing like musical notes. Just some food for thought.

Last exam approaching next week. Finally starting to get the ‘Romance Flamenco‘ tabsheets done and will be able to start recording my next original soon. Also got another one of these Dinner Shows coming up on the 16th at the same winery. Looking to be a good night so far. Not much else besides that but I shall be back on top of things next week!

JL