lowquality.net

I started classes at ECPI this week and so far it has been good, but now that I have started a non-music edu­ca­tion, my inter­est in music seems to have peaked again. As a result, I am prac­tic­ing pretty reg­u­larly again, which is good. If any­thing good comes from my attend­ing the school at this point, it’s that I am get­ting into a reg­u­lar sched­ule. I am get­ting up way ear­lier than I have in years, which means I go to bed a lot ear­lier so I am not stay­ing up late and eat­ing and watch­ing TV and doing noth­ing. ECPI is prov­ing to be a major fac­tor in the JAFAP. Since school is only from 8AM to 1PM, I have plenty time for prac­tic­ing, as well as teach­ing, which is some­thing I need to pick up the pace on.

(I made some fly­ers for bass lessons, any­one have any ideas where I should put them?)

I think learned some­thing about learn­ing today. For a long time, I had resolved myself to being “right brained” with­out really under­stand­ing what it means. If you read any­thing about the human thought process, being “right” or “left” brained has noth­ing to do with app­ti­tude to dif­fer­ent sub­jects, but just how you approach those sub­jects. Music is regarded as a cre­ative or “right-brained” activ­ity by many but I know of quite a few “left” brained musi­cians who see and revel in the ana­lyt­i­cal aspects of music. I was totally dread­ing tak­ing math courses again (I haven’t cracked a math book since high school) but today I had my first class with Mr. Hamza at ECPI, and he’s pretty incred­i­ble. My first impres­sion of him is that he is a “right brained” per­son who works with num­bers. One thing he said that struck home was his focus on the process of the equa­tion, not obsess­ing over the cor­rect answer. Since it’s what I do, I attempted to relate this phi­los­o­phy to music and the cre­ative process. The result really doesn’t mat­ter in music, you know how a song will end, the fun part is get­ting to that point and what you do in between. I’m see­ing the pos­si­bil­ity that num­bers can be approached in a cre­ative way that is every bit as effec­tive as sim­ply seek­ing the right answer. I can’t really go into the detail. I am just see­ing the tip of the iceberg.

How­ever, I was pleas­antly sur­prised that my strong music the­ory back­ground was help­ful in wrap­ping my head around some of these basic alge­braic con­cepts that had for­got­ten (or so I thought I did). Mr. Hamza made a state­ment at the begin­ning of class that many peo­ple who hate math turn out to be good “math thinkers” and it’s just a mat­ter of get­ting the tools. I won’t say that I had no role in my abil­ity to learn this stuff before, but no teacher I had in high school (or mid­dle school) ever made these con­cepts seem func­tional, usable, or even rel­e­vant to me. I have a feel­ing, just based on my first expe­ri­ence with him, today, that Mr. Hamza is about to change my whole per­spec­tive on math.