Your purpose in music?

[islander]

Have you ever thought what is your purpose in music? Besides the fact that it makes you feel good and makes you feel accomplished to yourself. Do you want to be the best guitar/piano/saxplayer in the world, do you want to create a new style/sound(like becoming new miles davis), do you want to please people in general, do you want to prove yourself to the world, do you want to live adventurous musician's life, do want to heal the world with your music? anything else?

I know that in the end, all above should become reality, but what's that main thing that keeps you going?

[Jay Norem]

It wasn't very far into my career as a drummer when I decided that composing music was my purpose in music. That was almost forty years ago!

[tpt1]

I enjoy seeing people dancing and having a good time while I'm playing music. And if I don't crack too many notes I'm happy.

[Dave Martin]

I enjoy the fact that I (mostly) get to play music that I love while making a decent living doing so. And when I'm playing the music that I love, I get to introduce folks to a style that they have often never heard.

[djangoblackbird]

I want to, at least eventually,

1.) Have multiple songbooks for different ensembles with different instrumentations, so that I can flesh out my ideas in different settings and still keep a strong group energy
2.) Play the trombone in a meaningful way that is clear, strong and fits in my own idiom/language, as well as others
3.) Continue to participate in as many groups as will have me, soaking up their musical language and putting my stamp in the language
4.) Be able to make a living off of music related activities, including but not limited to performing, composing, reviewing, teaching, etc.
5.) Contribute my music to a worthy social cause, like a benefit or a movement of activism

I'm very short on this long road, but I'm still on it...

[engelbach]

Originally Posted by islander

Have you ever thought what is your purpose in music? Besides the fact that it makes you feel good and makes you feel accomplished to yourself.

To be honest, I never did.

I'm rather Cartesian in that respect.

I love the sound and the feeling, so I play.

[Tom K]

I'm an amateur musician, and I enjoy playing. I don't need to make a living off it. Like Jerry, I like the sound and the feeling. And I want to get better.

I also love listening; I go to concerts. But music is not the only thing in my life.

[tornado]

1. to have an outlet to get music that constantly runs through my mind out into the universe

2. get laid

In no particular order...

[Open Lane]

Occasionally, I feel connected to the god and the universe when playing guitar. My goal is to make that feeling consistent.

[Mike A]

Like Jer, I love the sound and the feeling. To me, the feeling has to do with this ...

A few years ago I read a review in The New Yorker of the book "The Happiness Hypothesis," by J. Haidt, which looks at what happiness is and how it’s achieved. Frankly, I never got around to reading the book, but I was struck by the review’s description of a study:

The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing what [researcher Mihaly] Csikzentmihalyi called "flow" — in Haidt’s definition, "the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities." We are at our happiest when we are absorbed in what we are doing; the most useful way of regarding happiness is, to borrow a phrase of Clive James’s, as "a by-product of absorption."

That’s exactly how I feel when I play music. Almost literally, it’s as if I fall *through* the playing into that Zen-like absorption. I don’t even consciously think of myself as being happy at the time, but clearly I am. It’s what brings me back to the piano day after day.

I can definitely see that getting to that state of absorption requires both of the elements described in the study: the task has to be challenging, but it can’t be too far out of the reach of my abilities at the time. If it’s too easy, or too hard, I lose interest. But if I can keep riding that edge between the two -- like keeping a surfboard in the sweet spot of a wave, I imagine, although I’m not a surfer -- then I can be completely absorbed for hours, hardly noticing the time. I make progress because the reach of my abilities grows a little each time. I’m ready for more challenge, or a different challenge, the next time.

So that’s probably my true purpose in music, pursuing that absorption and the happiness that comes with it. It’s a sweet, powerful, enduring, benevolent drug.

[Open Lane]

Originally Posted by Mike A

Like Jer, I love the sound and the feeling. To me, the feeling has to do with this ...

A few years ago I read a review in The New Yorker of the book "The Happiness Hypothesis," by J. Haidt, which looks at what happiness is and how it’s achieved. Frankly, I never got around to reading the book, but I was struck by the review’s description of a study:



That’s exactly how I feel when I play music. Almost literally, it’s as if I fall *through* the playing into that Zen-like absorption. I don’t even consciously think of myself as being happy at the time, but clearly I am. It’s what brings me back to the piano day after day.

I can definitely see that getting to that state of absorption requires both of the elements described in the study: the task has to be challenging, but it can’t be too far out of the reach of my abilities at the time. If it’s too easy, or too hard, I lose interest. But if I can keep riding that edge between the two -- like keeping a surfboard in the sweet spot of a wave, I imagine, although I’m not a surfer -- then I can be completely absorbed for hours, hardly noticing the time. I make progress because the reach of my abilities grows a little each time. I’m ready for more challenge, or a different challenge, the next time.

So that’s probably my true purpose in music, pursuing that absorption and the happiness that comes with it. It’s a sweet, powerful, enduring, benevolent drug.

I think we're on the same page.

[duane massey]

Primary goal is to play what I hear in my head. Secondary is to create a mood within the listener(s) by what I play.

[page]

My main purpose is to express. I try to be as honest as I can while playing and I do hope people can feel that at at times.
There are other reasons as well, but this is the main thing for me.

[good rhythms]

since i got my first pair of bongos at 8, it was afro diasporic concepts that pulled me into music and made me want to express music

the act of immersing myself into pollyrhythmic , call responce,syncopated concepts brought to us from sub Sahara black Africans, who developed these genius concepts a long long time ago, made me aware of turning off my thinking brain and getting in touch with my intuition and feeling

no other concepts directly invovle this turning off the thinking brain to get in touch with intuition and feeling, quite like the sub sahara black african concepts, they were made to do specificly that, tied into a drum dance dynamic

after my initial passionate years of devoting myself to that, i became a profesional and played everyone's musci the way they wanted it played as any profesional has to do....

for twenty years, i did that to make a living and would make part of that the music and concepts i loved, and the rest , all the concepts that werent about that but, the last 20 or 25 years have gone back to my original reason for loving and wanting to play music

i agree about many things people say here that motivates them and have done a lot of them, but,my real purpose in music now is to make sure i go on stage , or in the studio or in my practice room to enter in those afro diasporic concepts and turn off my thinking brain and get in touch with my intuition, feeling and soul...the spiritual benafits for my personal soul are far and away the most profound reasons for wanting to get on my insturment and play music

[Dragan Cvetkovich]

Originally Posted by islander

I know that in the end, all above should become reality, but what's that main thing that keeps you going?

Adrenalin I guess .. makes me excited and happy above all!!


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