I've been doing a lot of thinking about art, and what constitutes art and what makes art interesting. And how artists of different media can learn from each other. How easy it must be for a writer to feel expressive, or a dancer, or a violinist. I don't want to get in to pity party territory, bemoaning how hard it is to play my instrument and how much I struggle with the current state of my life. But this is my blog and I'm experimenting with writing, and you'll just have to deal.

I am a musician. Sometimes I think that that doesn't make me an artist, it simply makes me a technician of sorts. I lock myself in a room with my bassoon and sheet music and I hack away at learning the notes, and eventually these monotonous patterns of practice turn in to something resembling music. Most of the time the transformation is never anything I can point at directly, and say "this is what happened to turn this in to something worthwhile." Which frustrates my logical mind to no end. I am burdened with an overactive left-brain.

Music makes me feel so much. Is it the notes themselves that do that, or are the notes just a secondary distraction? If I play a B, it doesn't make me feel sorrow, or joy, or anger. If feeling is first, then one who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly touch you?

How different my process is from a writer's or painter's. I often envy them in their ability to have a tangible result to all their hard work. When a play is written, you have pages of scribblings to look at. If you're writing by hand you can gather the pages that you deem unfit, wad them up in a ball, and throw them in the bin. At the end of the day you can reach out and touch what you have worked on. At the end of your creative process you have something that you can present to others, that they can take home, that they can touch and experience long after you're finished. Performance based art disappears in to thin air. After a day of practicing I have no sheaves of paper to keep track of how much work I've done. It's not about productivity, and in a society like ours, where product rules all, this is a hard thing to come to terms with.

We want things to be categorized, empirically measured and sorted and orderly. Musicians do not live like this. It is very isolating at times to be at home, trying to work patiently, while the world around you is keeping score. I am learning to judge my efforts by my own scoring system, and not by anyone else's. It's hard.