Just Not Interested Anymore

I've played piano for 10 years. I love it, but I'm just not interested. I feel like I'm stuck. Classical music just isn't cutting it niether is popular music. I would love to write my own stuff but I feel like I'm stuck in the very technical side of it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated

thankyou very much

 

Do something else. There's no point in torturing yourself if you are not interested...
If you want to write your own stuff, you need more than just an interest, you need a passion... or you'll find yourself back in the same place eventually,IMHO

 

do you ever jam with other people? i myself find that playing with fellow musicians just takes music to a whole new level. there is an energy that is created when you and three or four other people really truely get into a groove. you work off of each other and you listen to each other and build on strengths. it's like creating the most perfect little world musically. i actually am finding it rather hard to explain. either way, make sure you always love what you do and good luck finding your way!

 

Think of others. Like the last poster says. Also, think of others in another sense. Some people need performers such as yourself in order to experience the music, vicariously. A live performance offers this, at a level of intimacy that isn't sometimes available to the casual listener with a computer or a CD player.

In a very real sense, you may be the listener's savior, for the moment at which you are performing. So many people come to a performance, even a street performance, just to be taken from wherever it is they are, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, to another place, like you are their tour guide. If you're not feeling the music, neither will they.

Choose pieces that move you, irregardless of their technical difficulty. It's not always the difficulty of execution that moves people, but rather, how much you are really feeling the music.

I notice, when people are really feeling something, when it is an intimate and personal revelation to them, right then, at that moment, as opposed to something they've performed before so many times that it's just another routine performance.

Pepe Romero, chair person of the classical guitar section of the school of the performing arts at USC, here in SoCal, said to his students, "Every performance should be an interpretation", meaning, YOU have to be feeling it. It's YOUR piece, YOUR moment, to display, in front of the audience, what it looks like when someone is immersed, psychologically, emotionally, mentally, in the music. There are those in the audience who have had a rotten day, week, year, or life, and are searching for something to take them away from all of that, if only for a moment. They are waiting for a savior, someone to bring them, vicariously, from their place of misery into your place of rapture.

You HAVE to be enjoying the music for that to happen. It's not enough simply to "perform".

I noticed, last time I saw Pepe Romero play, that he holds his guitar like he's caressing it, with his head leaning over as if to listen to it, tenderly, listening to hear what it's saying to him. When I see that look of rapture, of feeling on a performer, and I know that it's genuine (some know how to "put on" an appearance), and I also hear it in the performance, it draws me in, and I feel as if I'm in a very special place. It often brings me to tears, that I was privileged enough to have been there at that moment, when so many others could not.

Music isn't necessarily just for you. But don't think you have to be some kind of slave to performing. My son, who also plays classical guitar, told me the other night, that he's not as interested in performing as he was. But he still enjoys playing, for his own sake, at different times throughout the day, or night.

It starts with you.

And again, others can add another dimension to the music. Do some listening. Get in touch with your feelings, Luke.

 

Also, I wonder if you've ever seen, met, or heard of Valentina Lisitsa. She's from the Ukraine, I think, but lives in Virginia. She's quite good. I like listening to her on YouTube.

 

halucinate the purpose , and then you got
a theory of music . ok? It well might be impossible
to "write it" tho compositionally it has integrity . one
trouble with this is a weak instrumental technique can make
you seem
the foolish pretender .

 

Thankyou. You have no idea how much that helped.

 

I don't have anything to add to the thread. I just wanted to say, you describe this perfectly. I've been lucky enough to see a few musicians completely become enraptured with their music and its like witnessing a very private moment. I know someone thats like this everytime he plays and it almost makes me uncomfortable to watch him play because its almost like watching him have an orgasm, its just that intimate. I don't know if that sounds weird or not.

but yeah man...the whole purpose of playing music should be to get to this point. You can't force it, but there are things you can do to open yourself up to it again.

 

+++

 

Have you tried jazz yet? Being an active jazz musician myself, I can assure you that you will find playing live jazz with other musicians a breath of well-needed fresh air. You use your technical skills to set the backbone of the tunes, but then, by listening to your bandmates and by simply trying your own new ideas out, you add a layer of personal touch to the tunes.

I found that it revitalized my bass guitar playing, which was stagnated on the technical side of learning note-for-note, various extremely challenging progressive rock songs. Jazz is like the wild side I didn't know I had until 3 practice-sessions in!