MusicyTechGeek

The struggle between balancing art and logic to me is a daily issue. When I was planning on being a teacher, I wasn’t worried about if music was going to be a part of my life or where it fit. Music would have been my focus, and not my ‘hobby’. I always thought that no matter what I was doing, that I was always going to be focusing on my art. Now as I have gotten older and my priorities have changed more from ‘creating my art’ to ‘living my life and allowing my arts to be my release’ I find that I’m emotionally in a constant battle.

I have this strong desire to create, simply create. I love to play with sound, because it is what I exposed myself to the most when growing up being active in the music world. I also love to look at and enjoy movies, paintings, and other various types of art, because even though they aren’t musical, I still get musical ideas and impressions from them. I miss taking the time to focus on this more, and expose myself to new various types of art.

Today, overall, was a great day. I finished the first of my 3 classes for the computer certification that I’m working on. I’m very happy that I passed the class exam so that I can move on to the next, but it wasn’t easy to get there. The material itself wasn’t hard, but forcing myself into the logic part of my brain has been the hardest part of it. It has been a struggle for me to make sure that I’ve been putting in the time to study, and work on everything to prepare myself for future job opportunities and goals that I have. I would find myself composing or listening to music, or working on my main website, or doing something other than studying the facts needed to do well in the computer world. It is nice to finally put a name to so many things that I’ve known of (conceptually) for a long time, but the other part of my brain goes “okay…you know this stuff..you have been dealing with it for years…why do you need to put a formal name to it?” I had similar thoughts when I first started studying music in college. I knew I needed the theory, but part of me didn’t want to learn it. I had blissful ignorance being able to explore the sounds without being limited to traditional music theory that is beat down all musicians throats when they go to college. I know many people will disagree with this, but I truly feel that the name of certain compositional and theory techniques don’t matter in the real world of composing. They are good to know to help you analyze and be more objective of your music, but the reality is, they aren’t NEEDED to do well.

I started exploring composition techniques when I was really young, and just found that I learn more when I can explore when I’m not told what my ‘limitations’ are. Terms – by definition – limit exploration. They make things more ‘cut and dry’ and give a name to things that really don’t need to be named. I find this to be much more true in the music world than the computer world, but to a degree it applies. Again, I’m not suggesting musicians don’t need to know anything about the music they are playing or creating, but I think sometimes education doesn’t help people understand things, that it just puts a limitation on what a concept is. Perhaps my overall opinions on education is more fluid, or it is possible I’m dumb and I have no idea what I’m talking about . I just don’t feel EVERYTHING needs to be given a name for us to be able to interact with it.

I’m still learning new things about music and computers on a daily basis. I love it, and I love to learn and explore new concepts. Sometimes more than anything else though, I just want to be downed in art, creation, and emotions from various forms of art, that I just want to get lost in it, and not remember all of the technical stuff that I’ve been taught about it. Understanding art, on a technical level, can make it harder to enjoy it. I find myself analyzing music as I listen to it, because that is what I was taught to do, and quite frankly, sometimes I just want to be able to turn it off!

I’m sorry if I lost you in my slight rant…I just hope someone somewhere can understand what I mean and the points I’m trying to get across. Now that my first computer class is done, I hope to be able to focus more on art and content creation. My vacation with my family is at the end of May and as soon as I get back I will be starting on my 2nd CompTIA A+ certification class. I’m excited about it, and I’m also excited about writing more music for the movie project that I’m a part of! I feel incredibly lucky that I’m able to expose my creative experience with people, and network with other people that can also just love the arts for what they are: controlled and sometimes uncontrolled self expression.

-Kyle