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Quote of the Day: Nadia Boulanger


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Here is a better quote from Wikipedia:

 ""When you are writing music of your own, never strain to avoid the obvious." She said, "You need an established language and then, within that established language, the liberty to be yourself. It's always necessary to be yourself – that is a mark of genius in itself.""

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She forgot necessity, the mother of invention!

Of course, the context may be a more specific condition.

When I took a seminar in Improvisation in the Adult Program at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins U, on the chalkboard was written:

“Improvisation is not the expression of accident, but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.” -Yehudi Menuhin

But when I was told to sit at the piano and: "A fish is swimming happily along in a lake, gets excited, leaps into the air, splashes back into the lake, and resumes swimming happily along. Play that!" I don't think my accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom had much to do with my playing.  I decided some major chords would provide a happy sound, then some more-chaotic sounding 7th chords with louder volume and staccato being the leap and splash, then major chords again - with a right hand melody just following the 3-4 notes in each chord. So it just went something like Cmajor, Fmajor, G7, F, G7, Cmajor. That came more from the Peabody Music Theory I & II courses I took than my yearnings. Maybe that's why I never reached the level of professional musician.

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52 minutes ago, MickinMD said:

I don't think my accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom had much to do with my playing. ... Maybe that's why I never reached the level of professional musician.

A performance and the spontaneous creation of an "improvisation" has less to do with technical correctness than it does with the communication that is happening between the performer and audience. The technical aspects may be the words but they are not the meaning. 

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