A photography book by a guy called Brassai was today’s random acquisition. The book is “The Eye of Paris”, a bit of an artist profile from this period in his career.

A random page had this photo,

and some text.

The random page talks about letter writing as an interesting view of a person at a particular time in a particular culture. Most of the page is a fairly aimless ramble, but talking about letters as a medium that  “once completed, cannot be revised”. It is different from artistic performances or artifacts that are truly transient, which is vanishingly rare nowadays, with the incredible recording technologies available.

Perhaps the best musical example of some that “once completed, cannot be revised”, is a live musical performance. Combine this with musical composition, and we get improvisation, which is real time composition.

I read a fascinating book on The Improvising Mind a while back, and it changed the way I look at practicing music, and the way I encourage my kids to practice music. One the interesting things that people who practice improvisation do, is to play a given tune in different keys to get a better feel for the tonal structure of the music. I’ve been encouraging my son, Max, to play simple tunes starting on a different note, in a key that he knows the scale for. He’s enjoying that.

Another technique to practice is to modify the tune in small ways. It’s harder to get the kids to be comfortable mucking around with the tunes. It certainly isn’t something I would have considered when I was their age.

Today’s Random Borrowing excursion yielded a book about PR.

I selected a random page. This particular random page is all about “The Learning Organisation”. My initial reaction to reading it was to dismiss it outright because it is full of buzzwords and “management speak”; it writes about people as objects rather than people. Ironically, the point of the section is that in order to get the most out your employees you should embrace their personal development and make sure everyone has a personal development plan. This is aimed at self-fulfilment of each employee; in other words treating them as people.

This very blog post is part of my “Random Borrowing” project, my own self education project about the composition of music. It is my own little project of self-fulfilment. One of the issues with self education, especially in such a vast field as music, is that I lack the skills to know what it is that I lack the skills in and hence should be learning.

Currently, I’m following a “learn by doing” approach mixed with some random exploration, which is good fun and I’ve learned a whole array of things that I didn’t know before. However, I fear that there are many unknown unknowns. I suspect that there are big areas of musical knowledge that I don’t realise that I don’t know.

There are a few ways I can try to remedy this. A few options are:

• Find some fairly exhaustive syllabus of musical knowledge and learn it all.
  • Music encyclopedia / Wikipedia music articles
  • Composition course syllabus
• Get one of these exhaustive lists and randomly select something to study. (The Random Borrowing project  is a bit like this. I randomly chose items from the library and find a link between them and music composition)

I can always just do stuff that seems interesting and see where it leads. The risk is that I may end up disappearing down a rabbit hole and “waste” time. Perhaps this is a better way to go anyway. It’s sort of what I’m doing anyway.

Another idea is to find a teacher that can guide me, listen to what I’ve already done and magically determine what I need to learn next. This would be much more structured, and also require that I spend more time than I do at the moment. Time is one thing that there never seems to be enough of.