Music is the transmission of vibrations.
It is pure communication. The foundation of language.
We simply tune in to the vibrations of others, as we transmit our vibrations back out.
If we think of music like language and speech, we would see that improvisation and composition are the most natural ways of making music. When we learn to speak, we don’t first recite books our parents read to us. We don’t first learn to read and then speak. We form words and sentences and attempt to communicate, to transmit our thoughts, feelings, our vibrations. By the time we learn to read, or learn grammar, or learn to recite poetry, we’ve already learned to form thoughts in to strings of sounds and annunciations; into vibrations. If we treated learning music this way, we’d teach our children by surrounding them with music, engaging with them, playing and singing and dancing with them, and encouraging them to participate. They would learn to improvise, participate, interact, to find their place in the music and contribute their vibrations into the whole, before they would ever learn theory, or reading, or repertoire. Music would then be to them a way of life, before it would ever be thought of as an Art or Science.
This way of making music is actually the natural way music is taught, in places where music is (still) transmitted orally. All one would need to do is look to many African cultures (among others around the world), where even the most mundane day to day tasks are often turned into opportunities to engage in music making:
Here, listen to these Ghana Postal Workers: http://youtu.be/vf0I5s-Ghhk
I sometimes think we get too hung up on genres, and style, and repertoire, and theory and rules…
…and forget how natural, simple, and universal music truly is.
