It's easy to starve your soul

When we're busy, one of the first things to go is anything we do purely for our own satisfaction.

Creative pursuits: music, visual arts, writing, dancing, etc. are easy to drop because there's no external motivation. No-one is making us do them, and there are no immediate negative consequences - such as attend our deciding not to go to work because we don't happen to feel like it!

There are even some secondary gains: a bit of relief from a packed schedule, and a bit of extra money in our pockets. These gains are soon lost to some other 'necessity'. The losses outweigh the gains, but again, we're the main sufferers.

If our lives aren't lived richly and creatively, nobody is going to tell us off. Your friends may mention it if you lose some weight, they won't if you lose some joie de vivre. Parents phone teenagers who have fled the nest, asking if they're eating well, not if they're keeping up their hobbies.

Yet a subtle malnourishment will take its toll. Sadly, it's easy to starve your soul.

This is post 20 of 100 posts in 100 days.

Music Lessons: too much & not enough

Modern instrumental lessons take people too far, and not far enough.

They're geared to turn six year olds into professional musicians by around 22.  

The usual path is by private musics lessons after school or by being pulled out of class. This requires discipline, with a minimum of 20 minutes daily practice (at the beginning) going up to 90 minutes+ daily to pass a higher exam.  That lasts for around 12 years till you finish secondary school.  You might also be in a band or an orchestra.  At 18, you go off to the Conservatory of Music for an undergraduate degree in performance.  The people I know completing performance degrees play for a minimum of four hours daily, and up to eight hours daily.

This is necessary because, for the past couple of hundred years, musicians and composers have been pushing the boundaries of human limitation in much the same way that athletes have. Lots of people can run a 4 minute mile nowadays, but that doesn't mean you'll quality for the Olympics, let alone win anything.  It's similar in the worlds of Ballet and Opera.  Everybody has to be better, today, than almost anybody could be 50 or 100 years ago.

It's bad enough that people emerge from such an education, only to find that there aren't enough jobs, and are branded failures for being technically more proficient than many of their teachers.  I have met people sent away by their music teacher because they're deemed not talented enough, or not disciplined enough to bother with.  At the age of 8!

Where is the place of the amateur musician?  The musician who plays for love.  Who wants to grow and develop in skill, but not slave away in a vocational sense?  Such an amateur is often graciously "allowed" to continue with lessons, usually in the "appreciation" or "leisure" stream. Well and good.  (This stream attracts the same prestige for the teacher as Remedial Mathematics does when compared to Calculus.)

I hope that such amateurs are not always treated as second class citizens who have failed to make the grade, because without them, playing music - not just listening to it - will become as esoteric as singing opera.