[N-lightMike]

Ok, so I’m back. I’m still trying to figure out how to word my experience with music. Here’s what Victor Wooten says in his book, “The Music Lesson”:

There are 10 elements of music (one way to divide it up into elemental parts).
1 Notes
2 Articulation
3 Technique
4 Feel
5 Dynamics
6 Rhythm
7 Tone
8 Phrasing
9 Space
10 Listening

Then he makes the point that melody, harmony, keys, scales, major, minor, 7ths, diminished, augmented, etc, are all part of “notes”. That means that very little is taught about the other 9 elements.

All of this means 2 things that relate to my TACiversary. 1) I have had to learn the other 9 elements on my own. (Like all of us who didn’t learn as kids at the feet of relatives who were “natural” musicians.) The more I learn about these other elements the more I understand what a music instructor is trying to tell me. 2) Tony does a better job of trying to help us understand the other 9 elements than most music instructors.

It turns out, you can’t really “teach” this stuff, but you can “show” it. Tony uses words and academic understanding as little as possible and does as much “showing” as possible. Since I live from my mind, this has been difficult for me to grasp. But, slow by little, I’m getting it.

Ok, this blurb is long enough. I’ll finally get to point in the next “installment”.

MG 🙂