The audacity of hype

I take music very seriously.  I listen almost compulsively at work.  I can multitask and analyze music in my head whilst I do my work.  Right and left brain and all that crap; it sometimes can help to be bipolar.  I am a so so musician, in part because my skill in reading music is limited.  I think the finest musicians have a great deal of talent in this area, especially jazz musicians.  It really helps to know scales (not the fishy kind) and how to read and compose.  If being a musician were as easy as picking up an instrument with no knowledge of scales, for example, and sounding out something pleasing, then everyone could and would be a musician.  It's like saying anyone who can read a number is a great mathematician...not so much.  If you are scatting in jazz you know the key you are playing in and while you have a great deal of latitude you have to know what you are doing.  I have an acquaintance who fancies himself to be a musician of great skill.  He has never taken a piano lesson, yet, with the audacity of hype, he put out a CD of himself diddling on the piano and actually talked a local store into carrying it.  I have no idea of how many he has actually sold (or given away).  But the audacity of that individual.  And he hypes his work to the masses or rather his coworkers as if he actually knew what he was doing in terms of musicianship.  I don't pretend that I am anything more than a middling musician; certainly not one capable of producing anything that would pass muster in terms of music theory.  And music theory is more than than just a guess at what sounds pleasing.  Sometimes, at a given point in time, it is exactly what is not pleasing. Take Wagner for example (yes, please take Wagner).  Or, a better example, Arnold Schoenberg...he turned music on its head, but not without knowing theory and perhaps eschewing then theory for a new theory of music.  So my acquaintance, of sorts, has no knowledge of this.  His work is very derivative and not original in any sense of the term.  In my experience you really need to know what you are doing in order to do it or parody it and he can do neither well.  What I have written is nothing great...it pleases me sometimes, sometimes not.  When I play with other music people I endeavor to keep all that theory in my head.  I need to practice more.  But, what the hell, I don't really have the time to devote to that kind of pursuit, although music makes me happy.  I recently had the great good fortune to play with a very gifted musician, a member of the Jamming Jews...he practices two hours a day, in addition to a full time job that has nothing to do with music.  It is his avocation.  He knows music and plays around town and in Grand Rapids.  My acquaintance could not even carry this fellow's guitar, much less a tune.  Yet my Jamming Jew friend doesn't put out CDs of himself diddling on a xylophone.  I have a hope that one day I can learn from him.  I hope one day that I can commit myself to more time to play music on the mandolin, which I am just learning.  My acquaintance once, when I played with him, picked up my  mandolin and tried to make it sound pleasing but that did little but aggravate me as he didn't know what he was doing and my teacher would have slapped the mandolin out of his grubby little hands.

Being a dilettante is not easy.  My acquaintance has this down cold.  He can't read music but he makes his music public.  He is a true dilettante.  I am one as well but I simply do not have the cajones to publish my music, write captions I think are clever, leaving the art up to someone else, or make crafts from kits and pretend that they are an original.   And yes, I am dumping on this individual as it infuriates me that people lacking any real talent think they are the best and the brightest.  Sometimes modestly is a virtue.  Sometimes it does take cajones to publish music contrary to prevailing music theory.  But for goodness sake leave being a dilettante to the experts...like me.  For more information please read my new book Dilettante Theory for Dummies.