A Quote by Anthony Braxton
The word music is a convenient way to talk about what I'm interested in, but actually, in some ways, it's a limitation.
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I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.
Music is made of what we do when we move, and we can only move in certain ways, in certain ranges of tempo because of the inherent constraints that our bodies offer, or you can call them 'affordances' - that's another word for me. It's a little more positive; doesn't make it seem like a limitation, but rather, a set of opportunities. You can say that that's part of music making, but there's also the imagination. The power of the imagination is kind of trumping - sorry to have to use that word.
The way I look at music, what I'm interested in is not necessarily creativity - in many ways I think creativity is overrated, actually. What I think is important is authenticity. I want to hear music that has the resonance of the people. I want to hear music that is an amplification of them. Because then, I can experience the people. But because the music has become so institutionalized, everyone is learning and regurgitating the same material in the same way.
Vulnerability is a loaded word, and it can off-putting and terrifying to people. The best moment of my life (and by the way, this actually wasn’t a single moment) was when I realized that I no longer give a damn about what anybody thinks. What you'd talk about as vulnerability, I'd talk about as simply being true to yourself.
And the word is capitalism. We are too mealy-mouthed. We fear the word capitalism is unpopular. So we talk about the free enterprise system and run to cover in the folds of the flag and talk about the American Way of Life.
I find there is room in music to talk with music. It may expand ways people can participate with music. It doesn't sound hokey or like some kind of voice-over.
When you read Boethius and some of the Renaissance philosophers, they talk a lot about the other spheres. There's a music of the spheres. There's a music that's actually in the universe, they believed, that's out there in different dimensions.
I think the way we talk about cancer has really evolved. I remember the way my grandmother used to talk about it, like a death sentence, no-one would even mention the word.
When we talk about the future, we often talk about it as damage and limitation exercise. That needn't be the case - it could be a Renaissance.
To my knowledge, there are, pretty much, two ways to be interesting: One is to actually do interesting things, achieve the remarkable. The other way to be interesting is to be interested, curious about the world and about other people - not relentlessly revelatory about yourself.
Music is so hard to talk about in many ways, It communicates beyond what our language can put across, and having to sit there and analyze it and talk about it is a struggle for me.
I could be going through something in my life that I might not want to talk about in my music because my music is the way that I escape some of those things.
Sometimes people talk about music, whether blogs or magazines, in a strange way where it doesn't seem like they're actually listening to it.
I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.
If I could, I'd go city by city, county by county, town by town, and talk to people to explain to them what immigration is really about - that this is not about me, this is not about us, this is not about us taking something from you. This is not about us being a threat to you. This is not about Democrat or Republican, and this is not really about border security. But in some ways our politics, and in many ways our politicians, have gotten in the way.
Once I re-approached music I had to do it in a way that wasn't so personal for me to feel comfortable releasing it into the world. Well, of course some of them are, but I would never talk in an interview about exactly what a song is about. I like to keep my music and my life separate.
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