Creativity through Music

I listen to a lot of poetry podcasts, naturally. In addition, I listen to two music podcasts in which musicians and/or composers discuss their process and their thoughts. I find these podcasts really helpful in thinking about: creativity, putting together a larger project, knowing when you reached the desired effect in a piece, cooperative artwork, and so many other artist issues and interests.

One podcast I'm listening to now is the Peabody Award-winning Meet the Composer (fashioned after the old radio show of the same name). It's host is renowned violist Nadia Sirota. The new season started last month, but prior to that they played some old audio clips from the original show, so there's plenty to listen to, along with the two previous seasons. You can hear John Cage, Meredith Monk, Caroline Shaw (who I discovered via this podcast, and now I'm a huge fan--she's what I listen to when I write, if I listen to anything), Donnacha Dennehy, and many others discussing the nature of music and sound, creativity, artistic challenges, etc.

The other podcast is Song Exploder, in which musicians discuss how they made their songs, layer by layer. Inspiration, improvisation, collaboration, adjustments, technicalities--all that and more are discussed by artists as disparate as Norah Jones, Metallica, and the composer who scored La La Land.

I'm learning from the masters, people. Oh so slowly, but learning.

Cage's Rules

This was posted on Facbook by someone I don't know, so I won't reference him here, but he worked with Merce Cunningham in the 90s and these were the rules, though as you will see they were originally written by John Cage. Although they were intended for students and teachers, who of us isn't one or both of those at any given time? Enjoy.