Doodlers and Noodlers

"Artists" doodle. Musicians noodle. But can a musician be an artist?

A composer of music usually writes down his creations, so again, he becomes a doodler, abstracted from his medium of sound. I studied classical guitar for some years, but abandoned it for jazz trumpet and flugelhorn, because I wanted to explore more of a creative process with my instrument.

I'm grateful for the time I've spent basking in the inspiration of Ponce, but sometimes I think the much glorified act of "interpreting" a composer's music by musicians is no more creative than a house, or sign painter, worse, painting by numbers. There is a lot of room for high craft, but truly creating something new musically, not substantially. For me, it makes a wonderful solution to explore the world of music through improvisation. To create music spontaneously, viscerally connected to the instrument being "played", as intimate and naked as my breath. Breathing my soul into every moment. If I can only bring a Zen like inspired mindfulness to every moment of music, calling a more profound muse from the depths to guide each musical nuance. I've read of Zen monks practicing their meditation with brush in hand, the gestures of every brushstroke an expression of their internal state; true mindfulness indicated by the purity of forms drawn by their hands, on the paper before them.

Yah right! Sounds great, but in the end we want a picture of "something", and a song needs a melody, which necessarily, at some level, is contrived. The compositional contrivance I used in this little improvisational exploration employed a "pelog" scale interpreted from Balinese gamelon music. Also, I over-dubbed my trumpet 3 more times over the original improvisation, to provide even more opportunities to create sounds that hinted at harmonic structure, though I don't really call this a tune.