Category: Editions

Cadences are of the utmost important attribute in music.

The cadence is nothing more than an arrival.

To cadence expresses that we have arrived at a new place within a musical narrative and cadences may happen in many, many different ways.

One way to cadence is melodically, another way harmonically, while even another way may be a rhythmic cadence; all signaling through their own workings that we have arrived somewhere new.

We could also implore an articulation or a dynamic cadence.  Or even a timbre cadence.  We might change the timbre of our tone to signal, “I’m cadencing, I’ve arrived somewhere new. I wish to share a different experience or emotion, or different information musically and artistically with you.”

Cadencing communicates arrivals that articulate flow of movements within music.

Composers and performers alike rely on these arrivals, these different styles, and different ways of cadencing to express their unique musical resonances.

– JC Heisler

There are unique intrinsic values to each one of the arts.  Of all the arts, music is the most abstract.

Music’s arrest on thought memory and emotion can be so indelibly fleeting that its ambiguities and pronouncements may linger in instances undetected within present moments of timeless experience.

It may be the most beguiling and the most powerful of the arts.

Musicians have a uniquely vulnerable immediacy and mode of expression that is transcendent for performer and audience alike.

This intimate awareness may inspire all of our practicing with focused commitment and urgency.  

Indeed, amazement and wonder at the opportunity to participate in something so profound, should inform our devotion to practicing and creating music anew.

– JC Heisler

The architecture of music is the happiest encounter.

Understanding what every single note means with specificity in a symphonic score, or piano etude, or in a trumpet solo deepens the spirit.

The meaning of these notes are detailed in how they relate to one another.  It is simply the relationship of tones to one another through time that gives meaning to music.

Attention to these movements becomes a great privilege and joy. 

Sound has its own choreography.

How we recognize and respond to these sounds, interpret them, and create structures, forms, and relationships within the innate provocation of these tones is the marvelous beauty and mystery of the musical art.

– JC Heisler

Music’s arrest on thought, memory, and emotion can be so indelibly fleeting, that its ambiguities and pronouncements may linger in instants undetected within present moments of timeless experience.  

It may be the most beguiling and the most powerful of the arts.  

Musicians have a uniquely vulnerable immediacy in mode of expression that is transcendent for performer and audience alike.  

This intimate awareness may serve all of our practicing with focused urgency.  

Indeed, amazement and wonder at the opportunity to participate in something so profound should inform our devotion to practicing and creating music anew.

– JC Heisler

Create an artifact in union with frequencies & sound waves.

As light waves travel, absorbed and reflected in constant motion illuminating our perceptions all around us; so too are sound waves moving among us and through us, engaging and affecting our lives in sympathetic resonance. 

Music is always singing, rhapsodically telling us something very important.  If we listen, we may be open to hearing with deeper humility, dignity, integrity, clarity, and elegance.

– JC Heisler

I feel that the the most substantive part of music is melody.  

Melody is structured by the physics of pitch manifested within the patterns of the harmonic series.  Tonal meaning is derived from the experience of these acoustic principles.

It is the intervalic relationship between pitches; the measurements of their distances, that imbue communal melodic meaning and feeling. 

Melody is further contextualized by the performed length of tones through the craft of cadencing, timing, rhythm, and phrasing. Rhythm develops and varies the melodic cadencing of these intervalic relationships.

It is important to consider harmony as a consequence of coordinating two or more melodies simultaneously in space and time, resonating further meaning.

All of these layers of melodic movement create a vast tapestry of meaning. 

A musician’s fundamental work is to study to develop a deeply personal relationship with the meaning of these melodic intervals and their movements; psychologically, physically, emotionally, and with personal syntax.

– JC Heisler

The idea of tonic is very abstract; yet it is a predestined experience for all of us here on planet Earth.   

This is how the physics of sound are manifest to us through the organization of standing waves and pitch. 

The standing wave’s frequency (the pitch we hear) measured in hertz, is the fundamental pitch of the harmonic series.

When you hear one note, what you are feeling is a magnitude of frequencies all vibrating, simultaneously organized, within the standing wave. 

This acoustic phenomenon is known as the harmonic series.  The harmonic series is derived from sympathetically organized vibrations within one single standing wave frequency.  These sympathetic vibrations can be expressed as a series of mathematical ratios in reference to the fundamental frequency or sounding pitch.

Within this fundamental pitch we have the blueprint for tonality.  In short we could understand every fundamental pitch as a tonal center itself, by virtue of the reacuring mathematical sequences expressed within the ratios of the harmonic series.  

That is to say each pitch, as a fundamental, has the potentiality to be or become tonic with reference to its natural acoustic structure resonating the harmonic series.

– JC Heisler

Music must be “taught” by a rich experience through the art form.

Analogies may give intellectual, conceptual, and philosophical perspective to “the student” by referencing relatable experiences to the pupil; this is not music.

Therefore, any postulated analogy must be considered as a step further away from, and not a source of, the actual experience of being formed by the art form.

– JC Heisler

You can only give away what you have.

You are not the music; The music is the music.

You have to be made in the music, to share through the music.

I know nothing extra of what I can share, that equals the experience of what only music gives.

– JC Heisler

“Don’t torment yourself with ‘I should’s‘…

Don’t expect your capacity to match someone else’s.

Absolute understanding trumps general understanding.

Be sensitive to your capacity, honor it, work within it.”

– K. Werner

People learn how to speak before they can read or write. 

The skill of speech begins to manifest after 18 months of imitation.  

A child begins to learn the process of writing one letter at a time between the ages of 3 and 6.  This begins the process of translation and phonation of written letter symbols. 

Between 5 and 8 years a child may learn to write a word, then two words, then three, and so on as; they begin the processes to read and write sentences.

It takes a definitive seven years for the skills of literacy to develop to the point of independent competency, where the child is able to participate freely and confidently of their own volition with great pride in their ability to perform the basic skills of reading, writing, and speaking (full circle).

This is a seven year process that coordinates the necessary skills of literacy, serving a child’s independent day to day creation, expression, and experience.

Beginner 4th and 5th grade instrumentalists are in their infancy of literacy; a sacred and magical time that should be cultivated, nurtured, and cherished for at least 2 years through positive and creative development in service of their individuality and the discovery of their own unique voice through creation, imitation, experience, coordination, and competency of musical literacy skills. “Formal”concerts can wait; performance should reflect a folk community “show and tell” celebration.

“Students” need to know from the very beginning, they are talented musicians and artists, their sound is valuable, unique, and cherished right away. Their sound is the music from the very beginning.

speak, write, read, write, speak

– JC Heisler

No teacher… not one person… can tell you what Music tells YOU.  This is between you and Music from the vey first moments. 

A discerning “teacher” is a musician who understands they are simply a guide in function, form, and performance.  A sensitive guide is attentive and submissive to how Music is continually manifesting and compelling the student to hear what Music may be telling them. 

In the end, Music does not need teachers; it needs participants in it’s fundamental precepts and practitioners of it’s  aesthetic movements within the art form.

The experience of tonic and dominant are innate at a very early stage of human development; it is our hearing essence. 

First

Teach how to hear the cadences of the major scale; not to read.  Teach without words; how to hear, Sing…Solfège.

Songs

A musician student needs to encounter the Beauty and Aesthetic of their Individual Original Voice within a Community of Sounds and a Heritage of Repertoire.  This can be accomplished at a very early age; and is indeed miraculous. 

There is no place for egocentric “clever” curricula. There is wisdom and truth in the tradition of the pedagogy contained in our shared historical precedence. 

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Einstein 

Give them the opportunity for the art form to be their fundamental teacher.

– JC Heisler

THE ORGANIZATION OF THOUGHT

Educational and Scientific

BY A. N. WHITEHEAD, Sc.D., F.R.S.

What is the ‘first commandment’ to be obeyed in any educational scheme?

It is this : Do not teach too many subjects.

The second command is this : What you teach, teach thoroughly. 

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty, and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore…

We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by (parents) before the age of twelve. 

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call ” inert ideas “—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. 

Education with inert ideas is not only useless : it is, above all things, harmful: Corruptio optimi, pessima…

…Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning. 

Let the main ideas which are introduced into a child’s education be few and important, and let them be thrown into every combination possible.

The child should make them her own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of her actual life. From the very beginning of her education, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which she has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through her life, which is her life. 

I mean ” understanding ” in the sense in which it is used in the French proverb, ” To understand all, is to forgive all.” 

But if education is not useful, what is it? 

It is useful, because understanding is useful. 

I would only remark that the understanding which we want is an understanding of an insistent present. The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. 

My Desire is to…

…create an independent phrontistery of musical study and art making that is peaceful, calm, and positive; that serves people’s need to be valued and accepted while honoring their individual hopes through meaningful musical experiences of performance, study, and composition; that gives people help, support, inspiration, and wonder in their own engagements with music; that brings focus and definition to a diciplined way of life in musical art; that has a purposeful presence in community; that has a rigid curriculum of clarity, rooted in the history and tradition of generous folk performance; that incites and provokes the attentive process of creation in the deepening and ever sacred present; that provides the freedom to amplify confident curiosity in the making of musical artifacts; that is opposed to and disinterested in shame, guilt, career, contest, judgement, grades, and “professional” egotism.

My oath…

…declares a devotion of gratitude with patient attention; to observe, learn of, and celebrate every participants’ individual skills, talents, abilities and unique voice in their creative expression though the art form; to stay out of the way, in a commitment to honor the freedom that only the art form inculcates; to help participants recognize that the beauty in the creative act is experienced through their own relationship with the discipline of the art form and is available for a lifetime of joy, perseverance, work, serendipity, manifestation, and development; to be sensitive, as this relationship with the art form will change over time as they change and grow over time; to model that fulfillment is found in the dedicated work of making, not in success, approval, accolades, or fame; to live in gratitude for the ability and opportunity to be made through the making of artifacts, as this is the humble source of all genuine artistic expression.

“If you compare one thing with another, you are merely lost in comparison.

You can understand something only when you give it your complete attention, and any form of comparison or evaluation is a distraction.

In observation, memory has no place.

The Actual; is…

…what is Actually Happening.“

– J. Krishnamurti