When my friends and I get together for lunch, coffee or whiskey, sometimes they'll ask what I'm working on. I never answer with anything this involved because it's impossible to not sound pretentious. But here it is in all it's pretentious candor, thanks to a recent conversation I had with my cousin. It's the summer of 2024 and this is what I'm working on:

When an Art, such as music, dance, drama, whatever, matures into its Classical period, it's integrity is so perfect that you can define most of its structure with a series of rules. Within its limits of expression, it has achieved perfection, it is Classic.

In music the Classical period is defined by the times and works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Bach had defined the theory by 1750, but for about 60 years after that the music continued to be refined. They weren't just writing only for the Church anymore, they were also writing for Royalty and eventually, the people. Chamber music, Symphonies, Operas. That's where it really flowered.

And that's what they teach in school, rules that are not so much rules as they are rough descriptions of what most of it seems to have in common. The sounds of classical music and the underlying tonality are derived from nature, from physics, the overtones of sound. Physics is universal and immutable, so you get a set of rules that are pretty solid. But suppose you turn the process backwards and use those rules to create something not suggestive of nature, but based only on those derivative rules themselves? Then the art enters a Modern period. Reality leading to rules=Classic art. Rules leading to an alternate reality=Modern art.

So there are elements of music theory that I intellectually know are right, but that I can't hear. Others can, but I can't. My ears work, sure, but I'm saying it's not meaningful to me yet. I can't play something that has no meaning to me, that doesn't give me some sort of a feeling. So I have to find a way to study it and hear it, get it out so I know what it sounds like, figure out how to use it. I need to know how it makes me feel when I hear it.

And there has been some progress lately.
I'm starting to use these sounds. But the reason I don't get thrown out of every place I play is that I apply the stuff to traditional forms. It becomes a matter of degree, not too extreme, not too careful. In the right conditions it sounds like something I think I sensed for a long time, but I never had the time and always had way too many responsibilities before retirement. I think about it all day long. Some of my fellow musicians here know that I am up to something, most don't. In Chicago more people would hear it. 

What I've been doing is applying the idea to a certain class of chords, dominant chords. There is a combination of scales that produce the certain result, but you need to be able to switch at any point in the song, at any point in the line, at any place on the guitar neck. And you have to hear what it will sound like just before you do it. There's two ways to organize sound in music: diatonic and chromatic. I'm getting a handle on diatonic. Now I'm starting to search for the chromatic, and on those occasions when I can hear it, whoa, Nellie.

Now suppose this all gets put together successfully and you hear me do it. If it really works the way I want it to, it just sounds pretty. Conventionally modern. It's different but still pretty anyway, because that's what I'm going for. It takes longer when you want to please yourself than it would if all you wanted to do was amaze people.

It's not new, not at all, nothing is new. I know all kinds of folks who are into the same concepts and materials. But the beauty of life is that no two people would do the same thing, ever, if we all had the courage to stop copying each other. My version of this will be something only I would put together in exactly this way. And knowing how most musicians think, it would be extremely difficult to copy this thing of mine, because by now I have a personal relationship with the music and with my instrument. My strengths don't define me, actually, my limitations are where my uniqueness is. I know people in Chicago who think like this. I studied with them, played with and collaborated with them. There are others who think like this outside of music, of course. They are active in theater, fine art, video arts, dance, any realm where the Classical period has given way to a Modern period. I know folks like that too. Those are interesting conversations, you don't speak about scales or chords or tunes, but you have rhythm, form, line, ornament, intellect, lyricism, expressionism and lots of other purely artistic ideas in common. Those are fun hangs.

P.S. Once I was in a music store trying out some flat tops. A couple started trying to talk to me. I didn't want to talk, I wanted to listen to this Taylor. Finally she asked me, "So do you play for fun?" My response to her was the title of this blog.