Yesterday, we had some new friends over for a board game afternoon. We poured each other generous glasses of wine and laughed about it. Towards the end of the night, when it was only the last few people here at the party, I sat the piano and improvised. Another person started to sing, and we made music together.
Then I played something wonderful and burst into tears about it, because I would never be able to remember it. I played it once — and then it was gone.
After the last party guest left, I had a much more emotional moment. I remember bemoaning that I was cursed with too much knowledge to make music like the music I had made with our new friend. I kind of lost it for a moment. I was distraught, inconsolable. It all came crashing down on me at once: I knew too much about music to improvise freely.
When you improvise, it’s not about all the rules that we’re all taught in music theory. It’s about what sounds good. No one will bat an eye at a surprise minor second or a few parallel fifths. You can’t overthink it. There’s no time for that.
But my brain is hardwired to analyze every bit of music it encounters. It does it when I listen to music, when I hear it live, and especially when I write it. And that kind of analysis takes time.
Improvising is very hard on me.
The worst thing that I ever did to myself and my music was give myself all the tools to analyze music and more through two degrees in composition. If I had known that my music would have been so impacted by amassing all this music theory knowledge, I would have thought twice about going to school for music at all.
The best music I have ever written was written before I knew what a secondary dominant was. It’s got this youthful joy to it that does not care about the rules. I will spend the rest of my musical life chasing that energy I had before I knew that parallel fifths were, in fact, evil.
I don’t think that music education is bad. I don’t think music theory is bad. I just have a very hard time separating the act of composition and my brain’s fixation on music theory. I don’t know how to fix this, but I can acknowledge that it’s making composition harder and it’s keeping me from enjoying music in healthy ways.
I need to improvise more. I need to let go of the idea that the music of the moment can be wrong. I need to accept that sometimes the best music is fleeting, gone in a heartbeat. And I need to stop analyzing everything.
I need more music of the moment. I need more music without rules. I need to be able to enjoy it again.