Years ago, when I was actively teaching drums in a tertiary level music school, I gained a reputation for being an extremely no nonsense tell it like it is in the most harsh way possible kind of teacher.
To illustrate my point, I'll let you in on a conversation I had with a student (who will be left unnamed) once.
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Wen :So obviously you didn't work on the material since the last lesson.
Student : Yeah I have a problem, I really don't have the motivation to practice
Wen : I see. So can I ask you a question ... did you parents force you to come to music school? Like, did they decide that even though you wanted to do something else, the WANTED you to do this and so you had no choice?
Student : No.
Wen : I see. Ok. Are you parents rich? Like, this school is not cheap.
Student : No my Dad is working two jobs to send me here.
Wen : I see .... ok. So you need motivation to practice? You just can't find it?
Student : Yeah I just have no motivation
Wen : Ok. I'll give you some motivation. Right now, today, at this very moment, there is a beautiful, blond haired, blue eyed baby girl being born in some Third World European Country. Upon her being born, she will be sold straight into child prostitution, where as a baby she will be raped repeatedly until she is dead. And this will be the sum total of her life. Her big problem in her life is that she will know NOTHING else in her life except these experiences. Your big problem in life is that you can't find the motivation to work at what it is that you say you LOVE to do, even though your Dad loves you enough to work two jobs to send you to a MUSIC school which basically means he's paying money to get you a job that ensures ZERO job security and gives him no guarantees that you can ever pay him back or take care of him in his old age. Understand? Baby Third World European Girl - crying cause she's getting raped and she will cry until the day that she dies. You - sitting here whinging about your feelings that are getting in the way of you getting good at the thing that basically everyone in your life is bending over backwards to allow you to do. It's not like I see you doing anything else with your life. So really, I guess that makes you the most selfish sack of shit I've met in my life. Is that enough motivation for you?
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Now, I'd like to think I've mellowed since then and have become less ... aggressive in the way I put my point across. But I too had my own crisis at one point at why I was continually working so hard at music and whether it really was all worth it.
This crisis came out of trying to be accountable to how I was spending my time and energy, and basically my life. When I was younger, it hit me one day that I had spent upwards of 30 hours a week practicing for half my life. This wasn't even counting time spent rehearsing with bands, performing, learning repertoire, everything else related to being a working musician.
I did it cause I loved it. I really loved it. Honestly the only time it felt like work was when I had to work in professional situations with people who were professional musicians, but did not love music as much as I did.
At some point, I experienced a deep sense of guilt that I was "getting away" with making a living doing the thing I enjoyed, but that I wasn't generating the resources I could be to make a difference in the causes I believed in if I had taken the same amount of energy and effort and put it into being a corporate (xxx insert career here).
I believe it's quite silly to bitch about the inequality of the world from your Iphone that was built in a factory by impoverished children, so for a period of my life I made some pretty drastic (and those who know me know these choices were DRASTIC) choices to try to do some other things to try to put myself in a better position to generate resources and power to try to do some REAL good, instead of just being a modern version of a travelling minstrel.
Here's some things I've learned from the experience
1. While i'm still involved in these other things, I will never be as good at anything as I what I can be when I am involved in music. While work ethic and general aptitudes for learning are transferrable across trades and careers, being able to have an emotional connection that drives you to peak excellence in general is not. The more I came across people who were truly wildly successful, even the extremely wealthy ones were involved in something where money was a byproduct, but the process was the fun part
2. I never believed in the healing power of music the first time round I did it full time, but I got to experience it when I did not have it as part of my every day life and consciousness. What I had taken for granted became something I needed to have in doses to be able to carry on.
3. When I finally decided to make the time to STILL be involved in music but I didn't have the label in my head that I needed to be a PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN, I started to get out of my own head. And I got to experience being actively involved in music in a new deep way and bit by bit it started to reveal its purpose to me. (at least for me, in my personal life)
All this culminated in a way of thinking that I got to put across in a speech that I was asked to give at a wedding of two of my dearest friends (who also happened to both be amazing creatives), part of which i'll let you be privy to
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I've come to realise that people deeply involved in their creative work are actually in search of something called "Truth and Beauty". And whether you're a musician, or an artist, or a designer or a mathematician - if you're deeply involved in getting to the core of your work, you're actually looking for something that represents or reflects a universal truth.
It is that desire to be part of something that drives at aesthetic sense, which becomes the guiding light we use to help us find our way about what the work we do is supposed to be and what it's supposed to mean.
So here's the thing, being human, none of us have a monopoly on universal truth. And through what we do, and how we live, if we try to be aligned with what we should be doing with our lives, I think most creative people are trying to experience being able to grasp fragments of this "truth and beauty".
What this means is that the fact that we're built in a way to appreciate the importance of aesthetic that really has NOTHING to do with mere survival and avoidance of pain and chasing of physical pleasure means that we're looking to be connected to something deeper that makes MOST humans happy when they hear a major chord and sad when they hear a minor chord or appreciate the comfort of symmetry in design or be able to sense the gestalt in a piece of art even though they cannot theoretically tell you why it makes them feel this way.
It is this deeper truth that exists that also connects MOST of us to understand that rape, murder and stealing is bad, even when everything in nature that involves wild animals shows that the way to survival and profit is to be totally contrary to these underlying morals.
Because if Hedonism is the ideal, then there really should be no space in the world for art and music anymore.
It is painfully difficult to be deeply involved as a creative and deny the existence of a higher power of which this Truth and Beauty is a reflection of.
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If what we choose to do with our lives is to be determined by the amount of resources that can be generated to maximise pleasure and minimise pain in our lives, then the artist is a fool.
Then again, if you take this thinking process and extrapolate it to it's logical conclusion, and believe all humans should live in this sole pursuit, you come to the pretty frightening conclusion that the law we should live by is that the Strong should deserve to eat the Weak if it maximises pleasure and/or minimises pain for the Strong party to do so.
In which case, us talking about the evils of rape, child prostitution, world hunger, inequality, slavery and racism is pointless.
And yet most of us (I hope) know that there is something deeply wrong with how the world works and all the evils that are involved in it. Some humans among us like Bill Gates build giant amazing companies and give Billions away to try to fight these problems and yet they still exist.
And at the core we all know that as long as the world is inhabited by humans, the ugliness that is justified by the Hedonistic ideal will continue to exist in one form or another.
So here's the thing. The first time round, I felt powerless as a mere musician to effect any change. Years later through a whole bunch of life experience in a very short amount of time, I've learnt that I'm not God, and I'm not ever going to be in a position to effect an all encompassing change to make the world reflect Universal Truth and Beauty. I'm not even in a position to question why he continues to allow the world to exist in such a broken state.
What I am in a position to do, as a person who has been blessed with an emotional connection to the sensitivities of what music is, and what it can mean and represent, is to be the best steward I can be of the blessings I've been given and do it to my utmost - even though I know in the big scheme of things, it will change absolutely nothing.
Because regardless of what any of us do with our lives, the likelihood that it's going to make a huge effect is minuscule, and even then it won't matter to us when we're dead.
To an untrained eye, a man might be seen to be standing completely still while he is standing and facing an invisible whirlwind. But it might take an incredible amount of force on his part for him to stand his ground.
In the same way, I believe there are two opposing forces at work in the world, "Truth and Beauty" and "Hedonism - resulting in the strong eat the weak". If we were to completely honest with ourselves, almost all of us exist in either realm and ideal, depending on the situation, time and space in our life. But my point is that while I enjoy my worldly pleasures as much as the next guy, I don't want to live in a world where the pursuit of those things is all there is to the inner truth of the universe because the resulting darkness is frightening. Being a musician (in my case) or anything that involves the dealing with having an AESTHETIC and trying to approach anything with purity even for a moment helps to keep this much needed balance in the world.
I play the drums, so I guess my instrument comes primarily as a combination of different instruments that were largely developed and used by slaves during the slave trade. While the origins of the rhythms are up for debate, we know that they came to be known to the world mainly due to the exposure of these rhythms to the western world during the slave trade.
If you look at the folkloric drum cultures of Africa, Brazil, Puerto Rico and Cuba (only pretty much the roots of almost any kind of rhythm we play on the drumset these days) the rhythms may differ, but there is always one common theme.
All these folkloric music cultures were developed by slaves whose masters granted them the permission of playing their musical instruments (for whatever reason). The slaves through being involved in music found their way to build community, culture, and maintain their dignity, in the midst of the insanity and indignity of being a slave. I don't believe any of them had ANY belief that their situation was going to change, but I believe that they knew the importance of what they were doing and how important it was to not give in completely to their masters and buckle under their heel. It was important to keep fighting a war they knew they could not win..
Coming from super privileged Singapore, i'm not going to even pretend that I know what it means to live in those circumstances. What I do know is this - at the core of almost all art is belief that there is something not right with the world and desire to express or reflect a perspective of what it should or could be. And it is this constant reminder to those who will listen and open their minds that the world COULD be different if we all were to try a little harder even though we all deep inside know that it probably won't that is the work of an artist - or anyone involved in the pursuit of this "Truth and Beauty".
With that in mind, if we who are involved in music are to do this, we really need start taking our work seriously enough that it should inspire the purity of devotion that in itself is motivation enough to be the best we can be at what we do. To my friends involved in music, the arts, or maybe even the pure pursuit of anything that doesn't guarantee the immediately measurable financial returns, let me encourage you that I've come to learn that while we all need to figure out a way to survive and make a living in this world, the fact that the world may not pay venture capitalist top dollar for our work doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
Because I believe fighting for a world that COULD be different is deserving of all our efforts and energy, if the someone or something greater than us that has created the Truth and Beauty we're all trying to be part of has deemed it our lot in life.
Without the word COULD, all hope is gone.
Is that enough motivation for you?
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