Stop Practicing, Start Feeling

When artists stop trying to change the world, the world stops changing

[stoppracticing-blog]

Stop practicing, start feeling

Did you get a find in your locker today? Yeah, hi, that was me. I promise I’m not here to turn you into some avant-garde, radical, political, activist artist. I’m just here to make sure you remember why you’re making music. 

So why are you making music? Is it because it makes you feel good? Because you have a message you want to get across? Because you want to change someone’s life as a performer, composer, or teacher? Are you just not sure? 

It’s important to remember why you’re doing this. To stop and ask yourself What is my purpose? 

[stoppracticing-blog]

It no longer matters if human nature is good or bad. We are no longer natural humans.

What matters is how we work with humans as their are. Good, bad, or somewhere in between. 

Art can take people where they are and transport them to a place they need to be. And even if it is only for one moment, one moment of bliss can change a person in an instant or a lifetime. 

[stoppracticing-blog]

Playing a piece exactly the same as anyone else is imitation, not art. Art is creating something new that reflects who you are.

[stoppracticing-blog]

If sound is made by a chorus, but no one is feeling it, does it still sound like music?

[stoppracticing-blog]

Feel what you play, play what you feel, sigh in words, cry into dance, scream out a painting

It’s the meaning that makes the difference

[stoppracticing-blog]

How revolutionary would it be if people just started living?

[stoppracticing-blog]

Stop Practicing, Start Feeling. What does it mean to you?

Practicing: technical, mechanic, drawn out, cold, disconnected, inanimate, bored, sterile, controlled, lifeless, simple, data, meaningless

Feeling: raw, real, emotion, story, meaning, connection, free, life, giving, full, complex, creative, power, true, art, realized, enlightened, heart

[stoppracticing-blog]

[stoppracticing-blog]

When Artists stop trying to change the world

The World stops changing

Art is the last realm belonging to freedom

It is the realm they are coming after

Corporate prodigal sons

Finding another dollar to squeeze from the masses that no longer know better

Trained to love that which will never nourish body or soul

Trained to salivate for stagnation

Trained to shudder at change, expecting the sting of the social police’s itching batons

artists turned into Pavlovian stimulus for the sedative nature of the “Netflix and Chill” era

Stimulated to the point of suffocation

Suffocation more constant than the wind

The wind even trained, dazed, set in the maze, spun up and distorted, moving along a path set out for it

artists blown unknowing, uncaring, addicted only to the blow

Artists left beaten at the edges

Fences chained, bleeding, laughing manic, screaming silent, broken

Artists watching on tiptoes camouflaged into submission

Artists starting to feel the pull of the wind easy

Artists, set the wind free