Saturday, May 12, 2007

Another music

Is there anything that brings you closer to your own music than the experience of playing another music? I've played Javanese music since 1979 and did a lot of early music playing before that, and as familiar as both musics have become, they're still not "my" music but other musics, filling the space around my own music, reflecting it, refracting it, giving it definition.

An old saying goes "you don't know a language until you know two." The same applies to musics. And while there is plenty of virtuosity among the monolingual or monomusicial, I'd prefer to err on the side of knowing more rather than less.

No comments: