im a proletariat soundmaking monkey, yes.
http://jodroboxes.deviantart.com/art/cymbal-monkey-202820833
one involves translating black and white to a real time sonic event (playing the piano), the other involves taking one's expression from one language to another (translating). and there are so many striking similarities which made me further refine what i think of what i do.
often when the refugee applicants ask me what i do, i say im a prole(tariat). probably as a reaction to the reality that classical music has became somewhat obsolete in the current G20 world, that it built and armed itself with great fortress of- class, economical and contextual separation. it feel funny when someone addresses me as an artist.
am i an artist?
i would like to believe that im a prole. my job as a musician is to create real-time sonic event (make sound) based on the physical codex, printed black on white (score), utilizing a machine (piano or whatever) in relation to emotional/theatrical directives of a scriptor (composer), in presence of other consciousness (fellow players AND audience).
that got overtly complicated perhaps.
so monkey.
but because i am a prole, i, as a player, do not create any ART.
when these sonic events are physically sensed (heard) and if the audience consciously/unconsciously attribute extrinsic meanings (sense of beauty/life/desolation/whatever either directly related to the sound themselves or to the cultural codex of the western classical music as sonic idiomatic expression, such as minor keys being sad and major being happy), and once the extrinsic meanings create a physical/psychological feedback (actually feeling sad with minor keys, etc), then it becomes art.
and once the actual event ends (end of performance or a piece), there may even be a continuous feedback in the audience's psyche that may be fleeting or becomes semi-permanent physical/emotional history (attributing certain music to emotions or personal/impersonal life events that then creates further emotional reactions). that would be ART.
the lucky thing is that because i can also listen to myself playing (which i should do more often HAHA), i can be part of the audience. i am able to allocate and assign non-musical values for my own playing (yay hooray this makes practice so much more bearable).
i think this is what i do.
you do that. But yet, it's hard, when you really think about it, to distill this whole concept to a word with threee letters: ART. As a dispassionate observer, you might dispense with this somewhat limp word with no real meaning...?
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