We Were Not Eyewitnesses

Here’s a personal insight to illusions’ want for relevancy. Insight into the scope of musical composition and performance are perhaps ideas you’d not thought about. As you read, keep in mind we were not eyewitnesses to human experience and trainings before we were born.

As any classically trained pianist, I’ve studied and performed pieces composed by classical composers. Getting the notes down with proper technique after hours of practice is one thing, but styles in which those pieces are to be played is quite another. For example, performing a Beethoven piece in the style of his classical period is quite different from playing his compositions written during the opening of the romantic period in history. Those are two different historical periods, and two different types of compositions.

After years of study, performance styles can be nearly intuited from notes scribbled onto the page by the composer. (Scribbles then printed onto musical scores.) But, what if a piano coach or teacher didn’t experience training in ‘proper’ styles of the different classical composers? The students’ understanding of the composers’ styles would not be distinguished from students’ own personal nuances necessarily interpreted into the music.

Because no one living was an eyewitness to Beethoven’s, Schumann's, Mendelssohn's, nor Chopin’s styles, of course pianists have taken for granted the composers’ intentions were brought forward through the centuries by piano performance instructors and coaches, as well as in recordings of the same pieces performed by many pianists. When stories and styles (illusions, et al) are handed generation to generation, the relevance of original intentions of style is only as good as the circles of performing artists who accept those illusions as such.

Likewise, not being eyewitnesses up through thousands of years, one must intuitively choose what and whom to believe from scores of biographers’ and scribes’ religious interpretations. Biblical texts we indulge today were reinterpreted untold numbers of times from ancient sacred texts written when Earthlings considered Universe sacred.

During the billions of years Universe birthed Earth, and early into the first civilizations, one cosmology might be interpreted as her-story, that is, stories of the sun and its marriage to Mother Earth. Yes, we were not eyewitnesses to early Earthlings who wrote texts proclaiming the sacredness of what we may call today physical sciences and the unseen mind of Universe. Fascinating!

Sanctioned Insanity

Dramatic challenges and upsets occurred during the first civilizations, in which Earthlings began assuming terms of his-story, a cosmology of sanctioned insanity: The human mind and language became tools of the church to separate humans from nature, and oppression took on realms of the religious. Into the medieval era, the male-only church tightened the screws of religion, and sanctioned the educational system, too. Earthlings were then further separated from their intuitive nature with Universe and Sun and Mother Earth.

Into today, millions of our global sisters and brothers are not suffering from political and religious amnesia. They might be helping U.S. residents in particular to stay awake to his-story systems we’ve allowed preselected, presumed elected, manly figurines to manage. After millenniums of slayings of women and their children, the religiously obedient and combatively over-bearing have become over-ripened fruit just ready to fall off the tree. A few more years may elapse before heads of systems’ sanctioned insanity will be pickled in their juices of hubris.

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.
~ Mahandas K. Gandhi (b 1869), Hindu Prophet, Indian philosopher

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead