Original Entry: Crossing the Void

What feelings do I love to play?
What sounds do I love to hear?
How can one develop a musical experience around the splicing of these two elements?

Awareness of the mind’s tendencies transforms the entire outlook on the practice.

Current Reflections: Crossing the Void

Looks like this week is a short and simple entry.

“Crossing the Void.” This phrase has always struck me as important, or at least intriguing. Because, what does it mean?

Crossing the gap? Bridging the shores? Stepping into the unknown, as life?

For me, when I started really steeping in the imagery that this phrase invoked within me, a deep and almost fundamental importance seemed to arise.

Life.

Primordial Oceans.

Darkness, Light, Motion.

Perceiver. Perceived.

Survival.

Microscopic impulse,

Reaching out into the dark,

Grasping for

Life.

A fish biting after a worm,

A swan retrieving it’s precious egg,

A crow collecting shiny trinkets.

You,

Me,

And that thing

That Won’t Go Away,

That struggle we can’t escape,

The barrier that we can’t see through,

The void we can’t seem to penetrate.

Just take a step and

Trust.

Does anyone else every experience a thought or emotion that linear explanations can’t touch?

“Crossing the Void.”

Hmm.

What Feelings Do I love to Play? What sounds Do I love to hear?

The other night, Aleah Fitzwater and I were just talking about the differences in our ways of thinking about music. I tend to have a very thorough and exacting approach to processing, understanding, and deepening my experience of music. Aleah was telling me that, especially when it comes to composing, arranging, and harmonizing, she leans heavily into her sense of feeling, going after the sound until it feels right.

“I could use some more of that myself,” I realized. I often overwhelm myself trying to map, chart, and dissect the musical universe of the guitar; I’m always trying to exhaust every single possibility and permutation when I’m studying. I want to see and intimately know where a single chord lives in every possible iteration I can imagine, and it’s because I want to have access to as many options as possible.

Maybe this is a good approach to studying and learning new things, but when it comes to creating and playing? Naw, get that shit OUTTA here.

What feelings arise the most naturally?

What feels good to play?

What feels good to listen back to?

What harmonies feel the best?

What grooves feel the deepest?

HOW DEEP IS YOUR POCKET?

When it comes to creating, sharing, and experiencing music, the feeling that it evokes in us may be the most important.

And if we can share that feeling, enable each other to experience the depths of reality, of the mystery of our own existence… if we can encourage moments of deep awareness, light-hearted joy, deep sorrow, and out into the fringes of language and past words limitations, well, that seems like a worthy practice to cultivate.

So what sounds pull at you? What do you like to hear? What kinds of melodies really pull at your heart? That seems like a rich place of investigation.

Love and Bows

_/\_

Sam
Kogen