"Music Mind", a book
"What doesn't come from the heart doesn't enter the heart"
This campaign (https://www.gofundme.com/music-mind ) is about supporting a book for musicians, and for listeners that want to get closer to music without having to resort to theory and such. I believe that all you can know about music you can hear.
I remember driving in New York City with Ornette Coleman and Ingrid Sertso. It must have been some time in the nineties. A yellow taxi in front of us had a bumper sticker that said: “I won’t blow my horn if you don’t blow yours”. Ornette said: “That could be the title of my next album”. And he continued: “I wish I could write a book where the readers would say: ‘If it is that easy I will get an instrument and play too’ ”. Ornette was a deep thinker and probably the major influence in developing the concept of Music Mind, which is grounded in the experience that everyone is musical; that we all have more musical talent than we’ll ever realize in one lifetime. Ornette was a master of intuitive improvisation and composition, laying the groundwork for an approach to music making that was not cerebral at all, not based on theory but on trusting your intuition.
That is exactly what Music Mind is about. It is about the way we feel when we play. How we feel and what we feel. How we manage to stay tuned into the flow of music. And what we’ll discover in the process.
The promise of Music Mind is to lead us to this place of natural flow, over and over: how to enjoy every note we play and listen to; how to develop confidence in our own ideas. Rather than looking at music in a certain style, we’ll look at the elements that are fundamental to any kind of music we develop a strong connection and a very personal “feeling” for them, independent of any stylistic considerations. Going to the bottom of the major elements common to all music –– rhythm, sound, space, dynamics –– can give us the most important tools for extraordinary depth of listening and playing.
The writing of Music Mind is in progress, to be completed in the spring of 2017. Several chapters and the outline are written. Web pages with music, videos and webinars will complement the written text. I am fortunate to have a great team of a writer, editor and copy-editor to work with. So, with your help we can get it all finished and out into the world.