For education creativity is a dark art.

The focus of today’s education seems to be to change one focus away from the arts and on to the sciences,  as a guitar teacher and educator in creative thinking this is become a concern to me.

Over the past few months it has become obvious that pupils and parents have changed their attitude. There has been a general fear of missing any time from academic lessons even for 20 minutes to half an hour a week in order to learn a musical instrument. If they only knew what goes on in the course of a day at school where there are obvious moments where the teaching day is disrupted because of illness and lessons being covered by other teachers or just down time because of some other event like children misbehaving.

I know through personal experience of the 40 years of teaching and playing the guitar, artistic subjects activate areas of the brain which are virtually untouched in academic learning. However the government guidelines to things such as not taking any time off for holidays during the term time has meant parents have become terrified of their children falling behind in academic lessons.

Also statements like ‘we should be like the Chinese, we should work much harder as do other countries children’ this is fine if you want to make them into a number of robots. I have no problem with somebody wanting to be a scientist or engineer if they want to, but trying to turn people who are artistically inclined that way seems to be quite ridiculous.

To me it looks like education targets are being set by the accountants of the world of education with their tick box mentality in order to the next stupid ideology in order to win an arms race of education against other countries.

 

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learn to play in a band in three days

 

Grief Molting.

 If you’re a singer and need to make songs, make a different song energized by your being alive again after your grief molting. If you’re a painter, paint, if you’re a dancer, dance if you are a farmer, plant. Just don’t assume you can use what you sincerely sent to the sea, for that is sending it all to the market.
Grief is a form of generosity; which praises life and the people and situations which we have lost. – Martin Prechtel.

The act of making music is a deep movement in the ocean of our consciousness or at least it should be. Music expressed by the great artists is exactly that this is the thing that marks out the musician from the technician.
The colleges are turning out lots of technicians and now the Chinese are getting in on Western music (at the moment Classical) we can multiply one hundred fold the numbers of great technicians.
The true artist is the one that expresses grief and as Martin Prechtel says it is a generosity and a praise of life. Now listen to the songs of Amy Winehouse, Billy Holiday, Bessie Smith and the bluesmen and feel the power; that is what we need to aspire to not just the development of technique that does not give us our true voice, technique is just mimicry.
Technique is nothing but a toolkit and a great carpenter is not great because of his tools it just makes it easier for them to be great.  So be very careful to keep connected to the emotional power that drives you and always make the tools be your servant not your master.
Now listen to the latest pop music and decide who the master is.
Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days of music, discover what you can do.

A person suffers if they are constantly being forced into a statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling – Robert Bly

The road of feeling is something that is difficult to show someone who is learning to play an instrument. It can be alluded to, hinted at, demonstrated but not given as a defined map reference for someone to find. The road is unique to everyone; the elements required are the same for all but ordnance reference will be different, because we all have differing maps.

The problem with something that lies in the unconscious  world of feeling,  emotion and imagination is that being hard to teach we reach for the things that are easy, statistical, measureable and mark able and that is sadly not helping people grow either musically or emotionally.

The statistical world helps only the accountants and leads to people to suffering emotionally. Imagine that you are told by a doctor that you have a 50% chance of survival from a prognosis, that is cold and unemotional and you might say good that the facts are delivered in this way but wait until you are in that position then you will feel that icy touch of statistics from the learned professionals and experts in their field. We are not Vulcans and Mr Spock may have been able to deal with that statement but humans do not deal well with this because it is devoid of feeling. In Garner Thompson’s excellent book ‘Magic in Practice’ which is about the use of language in health care the importance of choice of words that engages the patient in their healing is very important but is sadly lacking today. The old idea of ‘bedside manor’ has been lost in the pursuit of targets and the magic bullet of Big Pharma. The evidence is that in a world where we are being told that things are better than ever, there are increased rates of mental illness and not just in the elderly but increasingly in the young. The word disease shows us in its epistemology exactly what we experience, dis- ease.

This is just part of the picture it is also true of arts and music, sound devoid of feeling is just sound not music at all however it has been processed through Pro Tools. So in playing or teaching we need to connect to the feeling that is the music, make the sounds connect to your emotions let it mean something and allow the music to set you free.

 

Vic

 

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The Golden Rule- Those who have the gold make the rules.

 This is a rule that applies to music as much as it does for politics and business.
For a moment cast all of one’s ideas of music to one side and think back to a past that had no Christian Church and no written notation of music, but had the story tellers and music makers, some of whom roamed and others who held sacred positions within the social group such as a village.
Music might have been learnt as sacred songs that expressed something ceremonial within the time of year and the society that it was set. This music may have been learnt from others who held the songs or direct from the source itself as in the South American shamans who would have learn ‘from the plant’ the sacred song.
With the advent of Christianity this all changed and over the years, music become more and more formalised with the idea of improvisation banned in preference of something that had been censored by the church; hence writing music and replaying the music of the masters note for note.
This in turn becomes the bench mark of being a real musician; that you can read and that you can play as a regurgitation of the music written thus taking away a musician’s ability to express their creativity.
We know this is the case because it has been documented again and again, most recently with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia (the latter not even being regarded as ‘citizens’ of the country that was originally theirs). The music and the instruments of the indigenous people were ridiculed or banned from use and the Western instruments brought in to replace them.
In a short period of time something that is instigated as a change in the way that music is produced or performed becomes the norm in a society where we forget the past so easily.
A light in the tunnel is the possibility of crowd funding music and arts projects through the likes of Kickstarter and Pledge. May this be the way of change to something more rooted in human experience, long forgotten in a distant past but like all true music is still echoing in the deepest recesses of our consciousness.
Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

The Master of Demon Valley

The mouth is the door of the mind; the mind is the host of the spirit. Will, intention, joy, desire, thought, worry, knowledge and planning all go in and out through the door. - The Master of Demon Valley.

This is an ancient Taoist text which was translated by Thomas Cleary some twenty years ago and it tells of how Taoist thought and philosophy of ‘the way’ could be used to influence and control the population.
The premise is that all things move from masculine active to feminine receptive or as they express it as Yin and Yang the Yang being the masculine. Language is used to develop that depending on where you are in that arc and not so much about the reality of language expressing truth as we think of it; more in a way of language as a form of magic and spell casting.
The similarities with NLP are interesting with the language being seen as fluid and influential to the mind of the listener.
So if you want to write a rousing song use rousing words, something about love keep saying love, a song about anger, use words that express anger even if they do not make sense in a literal way use language’s power of poetry.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Is in the way you tell ‘em

 A pupil of mine is working on the blues phrasing of Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan and the way that the lines from the former are found in the playing of SRV. However there are differences and he also mentioned to me that he was finding it confusing listening to various versions on the internet of transcriptions of Stevie’s Crossfire.

He asked ‘How is it that different versions of the same solo exist from different transcribers?’ The only way I could answer him was to say ‘please pass the salt’ and then ‘please, pass the salt’ they mean subtly different things. It is all in the dynamics and delivery and that maybe the listener will interpret different meanings in what they hear, a little like saying does your seeing of the colour blue match someone else’s seeing of that colour.

Guitar playing is very much like speaking a language and therefore you need to listen and then play what you hear NOT what someone else tells you they hear. When you have a number of phrases speak them in your tongue make the phrases communicate and remember that what you hear may not be what others hear. Hear with your feelings and not with your intellect, this will be more truthful; then hone it down like a child would do with language.

Vic



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Three days of playing in a rock band – learn the tricks of the trade.

 

Giving up ownership of your inspiration

The idea that we are not the source of the songs and that we only act as a conduit for the music is an appealing thought for me.
Leonard Cohen expressed this beautifully in his acceptance speech to the Prince of Asturias Foundation were he said the skills of playing guitar were handed to him by a young Spanish guitarist whom he met in Montreal and his lyrics were inspired by the great Spanish poet Lorca. Here is the link to that speech on YouTube https://youtu.be/VIR5ps8usuo
He said of Lorca that he taught him to find his voice even though he understood well the rules of poetry he did not have a voice until he read Lorca. The young Spaniard who taught him the fundamental chords of the guitar gave him the ingredients for all of his songs in six chords, in essence Cohen passed the ownership of his songs back to the land of Spain because the inspiration was rooted in its soil although he personally has no hereditary link.
There seems something fundamentally magical about giving up ownership of your inspiration; it seems to open the flood gates to ideas, pictures, words and feelings as if brought by the muse’s from somewhere else.
So much of education is about being ‘in your head’ whereas the area of creativity is linked to something less formed and something more abstract.

Vic

www.bluescamp.co.uk

Break the Rules

The successful artist that break the rules of the expected way to do things interests me. They are the ones that point to the answer to what makes a great musician.
These anomalies, the Muddy Waters, the Captain Beefheart’s  the John Lee Hooker’s, the Django Reinhardt’s and the Bob Dylan’s of this world are the ones who do not know scales, cannot read music, they are often the illiterate, the ones who play from the heart, the drug takers, the heavy drinkers, the iconoclasts, the womanisers, the radicles and the ones who think outside the box.
The list of these characters includes the deformed, the mentally ill, the revolutionaries, the anarchists and traditionally the ones who get arrested, thrown into jail, and die young.   The fact that rule breaking and the bending of normality seems to be inherent for these people.
Look at those you teach or work with who are different and you will see something powerfully creative in them and that is something which can be tapped into to.
Jimi Hendrix wasn’t necessary the best guitarist for his time actually that fell to the likes of Wes Montgomery and Tal Farlow but Jimi took what he heard and coloured it through the prism of his experiences and personality.
So let us embrace the different and the awkward and counter intuitive (or counter intellectual) and make something expressive and beautiful and challenging.

Vic
www.bluescampuk.co.uk check it out

Language tells the mind what to see and what remains hidden and it is language that makes the world exist in our mind. Without the words we have no way to frame it.

An interesting concept, that words not only reflect but also frame how we think.
We can  see evidence of  this in national consciousness, for instance the poetic language of Iran leads to the rather unusual (to the West) allegorical political statements that we are unfamiliar with, which sound as if the speakers  are trying to hide something. Whereas the rather simplistic English used by the Americans lead to the rather blunt and politically aggressive statements which are more familiar. 
There is a theory that the very essence of language; the words, not only are the tools for expressing our thoughts but may also be the things that create our ability to think in a certain way. So if you have a word for something you can experience it, if you do not then you cannot experience it.
Subjugated people have throughout history had their language and their beliefs taken away or debased in order for ethnic cleansing to happen. We as a nation had this happen to us where the native tongue of the British was taken away by the Romans and then that was taken away by the Saxons to be then taken away and debased by the Normans.
Adding music to words can make the effect of language more potent, think of the religious use of music and language with chanting and song. Lyrics are hypnotically powerful because of the rhythms and it is easily possible for music to induce a religious trance. I am not sure why this is but I would guess that the rhythms impact the unconscious aspect of the memory stopping the intellectual analysis of the words and allowing the unconscious effect to take place.
Words carry an emotional resonance, also the way words are spoken changes that level of resonance. Words such as ‘Love’ and ‘Trust’ carry an emotional resonance which will be different to different listeners depending on their experience. Words such as Hate and Greed are so loaded with emotional meaning and are often used by governments and society to create the organising effect of the ‘Leopard outside’ making a community bond through fear. This technique is being used for everything from Fracking (lack of energy), to Terrorism (fear of the apocalypse from the men with beards) to GM (the lack of food security). The truth as always is more complex and nuanced than that and often the deciding point left out is someone is going to make a lot of money out of the desired result of fear but we are being corralled by the smell of fear or moral panic.
The language that we use frames our personal world and language is the way your world functions. Now it is our turn to use language in a way that is truly powerful, with music.
Vic
 www.Bluescampuk.co.uk

Pre sort clients.

A few years ago I came across a company that used some unusual techniques for marketing.

They started as a carpet cleaning company in America or Canada but their techniques were so effective they took the ideas and franchised them out to other carpet cleaners and then started to teach the marketing ideas to other industries.

The company called itself Piranha Marketing because the idea was to 'eat the competition alive'. Some of their ideas had been taken from other business sectors but they had managed to take them up a gear or two.

One of these ideas was how to pre sort the enquiries so that only the ones of use to you contact you for a booking, thus saving you time and money on unnecessary enquiries.

The idea behind this was novel it was by using a long pre recorded phone message giving all the details of your business. I believe that this was a good idea and by giving a prepaid number no one was too bothered about how long the message was.

The idea was to inform the customer about the business and why they should choose you and not someone else. By the end of the call the 'hot' prospects were leaving their details but the time wasters had already hung up.

We often spend money in the wrong place when we advertise; aiming at the wrong people so even when you get people interested they are often the people who you don't want anyway.

These ideas were pre internet so another way of doing this would be to put something on YouTube that clearly marks out why you are the best and why someone should choose you so by the end of the film they can phone you so leave the details then.

Remember that you will need to leave the details on your site about the YouTube film and make sure that people visit there before they contact you by offering a special deal.

Vic

 

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk for three days of playing in a rock band tuition.

 

 

 

Laziness on the curriculum

I am currently preparing for some corporate training and NLP programmes, digging through books and just sitting thinking about the things to be covered, I have been reflecting on music, society, education and us.
Most of the time I go around in some form of robotic state and this trance state does my driving, teaching, eating and many other functions but what I have noticed is that state does not do song writing and guitar practice, if anything it stops me and that is something I need to change in my life.
The only reason I find for this is creativity is something that happens when I am totally relaxed and have nothing to do, in other words in my idleness zone.  So idleness is one of the things that I need to embrace and find for myself otherwise nothing will change for me.
The other state that I find useful and again one much maligned is the state of naivety, without it one would never do anything because the odds are so stacked against you why bother.
In the past naivety has helped me become a guitarist, helped me play gigs that I will think about as real achievements in my life and taken me to life experiences that shaped me; if I thought about those things first they would never have happened.
So let us include laziness into the school curriculum so that daydreaming will develop the creative trance and let us do it in a state of total naivety so that children and adults can believe anything and in that blissful state open the mind to the possibilities of new ideas set apart from the ideas of society that restrict.

Vic


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It is no measure of health...

Reaching out as much as possible to friends and family, without feeling humiliated or the stigma that is carried with the label ‘depression’ and the negative phrases that go with it, mental illness, mental disease. Krishnamurti was right “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

 

With every death of someone who is conspicuously talented like Robin Williams whose very brilliance is predicated in their state of mind we then have a period of soul searching about mental health.

It might be better to think of it as a disease because if we go back to the original meaning ‘ dis ease’ then that unease that people feel with their lives and society then the quote of Krishnamurti is validated.

 

The amount of pressure to succeed to be responsible and capable when in reality we all fail, are often irresponsible and incapable makes many feel uneasy with life for some they wear a face that works in public, they are funny, talented and crazy. When the mask slips someone like Robin Williams decides it is time to check out and we are shocked by the fact he wants to leave.

I would suggest that we take a long hard look at society and also how governments work and see that there are many areas that are profoundly sick and some of these things only occur to us when we step back and look from a detached place.

So from this place look at what music could do to create meaning in people’s lives when viewed as a creative self-development, in my experience I have taught a number of doctors who by their own admission have said that music has saved them from having ‘another nervous breakdown’

Vic

 

Foundations of Life.

We must go down to the very foundations of life, for merely superficial ordering of life that leaves its deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no attempt at order had ever been made. – I Ching
Ok a little deep but this week I am looking at levels of change which can happen with life events such as a divorce, loss of employment, ill health or death of someone close. Also deep levels of change can and do happen when you explore oneself through music and traditionally this was an excepted part of personal development.
One of the frustrating things for therapists who really want people to get better is that they find it difficult to create change in old habits and form new ones in their clients that would lead to the improvement and healing that they seek. It seems that even ways of living however destructive because they are familiar are better than the unknown however promising their adoption would be, therefore people carry on as normal.
The advantage with music is one can affect some sort of change without realising it especially adults whose whole development of musical skills might be wrapped up in letting go of negative programming built up over the years of educational brainwashing. Because it is not obvious what is going on by incorporating subtle changes of thinking whilst learning music, things that were believed before like the lack of musicality and creativity can be disproved and then lots of changes can happen.
If this was obvious to the ancient Chinese sages then it might be interesting to know how they affected change. We know that along with acupuncture, herbs and meditation, sound was part of the therapy.
Vic

I am preparing for a new term and this one is long and busy and a change is needed.

I am aware this year of a change due to the things that I have done, I am looking closely at what I am currently doing and that maybe I need to change that as well.
I have been troubled by the way education funnels the mind of children into smaller and smaller focus which may have been good for sending them to the office or the factory but in today’s society we need flexibility and creative thinking with the ability to learn new things and new skills and that is not being addressed by schools in my humble opinion.
I heard an interesting talk on the radio by science fantasy writer Jasper Fforde saying that schools need to promote imaginative thinking and not focus on science because what we need are new ideas not a reworking of old thoughts .He raised the interesting point that on a mobile phone the only new idea was the liquid crystal display everything else was reworking of old technology.
Old paradigms that drive political and economic thinking have taken us to a number of dangerous places which is evident in the non-ecological aspect of most government thinking. For example instead of creating more energy we should just use less, we are using three and a half times what this planet can sustain in the West and that cannot continue whatever we think, this is a bit like death, you might be able to delay it but it is coming for you.
What matters in our thinking should be what world are we leaving for our children? At this rate we are destroying our grandchildren because we are destroying the ecosystem that they require; don’t get me wrong here the planet does not need saving that will adjust but it will be without us. We are at the top of the food chain we are the most vulnerable and the change that we need comes from all of us not from politicians and we can start by changing how we teach our children.
Vic

Unknowable......

I am running a school where you are not obliged to know stuff or be an expert. It is more about being able to wonder and to learn a little, and that is all that a life needs. - Steven Jenkinson.


Ah if only this was the attitude that people had when they stared to learn music, finding themselves through exploring sound and playing and the joy of working with others understanding that mind reading is not as science would say nonsense but something that musicians do all of the time.
Art comes from the dreamlike world of the unconscious which does not require paper qualifications and recommendations of the halls of academe but the attention of the ordinary people that you have something to say or something to teach.
Music is the expression of life and its weirdness and its love and its pain, nothing to do with measurement or repeatable scientific research; that is for the people in white coats.
I have often pondered that if J K Rowling had written about a young scientist who had gone to a special school to fulfil his destiny whether she would have had such a success in her writing? I would say not.
So let us embrace the people that make us feel good whether they have qualifications or not and here is to sticking a finger or two up to the accountants who want to measure and the scientists who want to dissect everything and then wonder why it is dead.

Vic



Bluescampuk three days of rocking out. ... www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Getting uncomfortable

I spend a lot of time looking and attending courses and festivals to give me ideas for Bluescampuk and seeing if there are new ways of making the experience exciting.
I have just returned from something which was more ceremonial in the hills of Wales and this experience was interesting for me because I felt totally out of my depth. I was in a group that seemed to have done it before so that feeling of uncertainty and the feeling of ‘why am I here’ which I know many people experience when doing something new really hit me.
I have always felt that the feeling of uncertainty for me always precedes a learning moment I have even got the point as looking for this as the marker that confirms that something needs to be looked at.
I have reached the point in my life that things that are comfortable are not really transformational events and that feeling of fear and uncertainty is what I need marking it as being out of my comfort zone.
I know that a lot of people experience this feeling when doing music examinations and it may be a good way of explaining why a challenge like this is good for them.
Vic

 www.bluescampuk.co.uk

In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless. -Aleister Crowley

A quote from one of the most famous or should I say infamous magicians of all time is so true of music as it is of magic or as Mr Crowley would have said magick.

Any art form from dance and poetry to music and sculpture is about expression of you the artist and one would use the tools of the trade – your talents and virtues as the building blocks to express this however without willpower you have no way of dealing with the blows that land on you from people who critique you and who are just downright jealous of you.

You need to develop a thick skin to deal with this and that is something that most artists do not have and it needs to be acquired.

A little bit like the skin on the ends of your fingers that start being very painful and then they toughen up and then one never feels that level of discomfort again.

 

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk

 

 

Right under your nose.

Sometimes we look for something and it is hiding in plain sight, right under our noses but because we do not expect the answer to be that easy we miss it.
Many of the answers in my own life I have found to be like this, something that I ‘stepped over’ in the course of every day and it often took something to change my paradigm to make me notice.
I was thinking about this with regard to music, some musicians get this instinctively and they know that the answers to their musical questions are already with them, they just need to ‘see’ them. Maybe the use of different ways of thinking through use of drugs or just dropping out help them to find what is right there.
I have explored the way that music changes consciousness and the way that consciousness changes music and some of the answers are so simple that you are amazed that they were staring you in the face all of the time.
This situation does not just apply to music, for an example I worked for a while in a bank as a cashier and balancing a till often led to a till difference where the figures did not tally. Once you had looked a few times then you would not see your mistake but someone else could spot it straight away. It was almost that you were hypnotised to what you could not see because you did not see it before.
So look with new eyes into things as if you did not know yourself…………..

Vic


www.bluescampuk.co.uk


Let us show you how to rock............

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors. Jim Morrison

The silence in between the place of naturalness these are powerful places; the between yes and no what Edward De Bono calls Po.
The Taoists call it ‘suspending your disbelief’ this is a creative place that things start from almost a trinity of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost or Sun, Moon and Earth or Above Below and Middle Earth all of these trinities are hinting at the same thing.
The Doors were one of the most creative bands of the period and they were greatly influenced by one of the great British writers Aldous Huxley taking their name from his work the Doors of Perception.
Morrison certainly put himself ‘in between’ but we can do this just by thinking ‘outside’ even dreaming something different will do it.
Try this today let go of what you think is possible and what you think impossible and make it plausible and then act towards it.
Vic


www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Ghandi

What a great motto for those who teach from one of the great people of the 20^th century.

Learning is such an important thing that is why it is not done in schools. Learning which is free and unfettered is the thing that brings down governments and creates freedom for ordinary people that is why Ghandi was shot.

I am not suggesting that we bring down the government but I am suggesting that the type of learning that people can do through learning an instrument is very different than the type of learning that happens in schools and this is the opening for you as a musician.

Also good learning is fun and effortless it is what the human mind does best, but when you are being forced to acquire information that is what is difficult because there is no joy in it.

Vic

  www.bluescampuk.co.uk