Well, that performance didn't go so well. Now what?

The guitar playing got progressively worse as the song went on. I could tell when I glanced out at the faces in the audience, which I couldn't do too much, because I had to focus so hard on my playing and singing, which was going downhill fast.

I knew what was happening. The adrenaline was kicking in, and the fight-or-flight response was draining the fine motor control from my fingers. I was powerless to stop it. I also knew it didn't sound too good, so later I felt this sense of failure. Even a desire to quit and not try it ever again.

Then I realized that was just my fixed mindset talking--the belief that abilities are fixed. The fixed mindset makes us want to avoid situations in which we might fail, because that would mean we're no good. It's especially powerful when we believe we are good at something, because then that belief is threatened by failure. It's what's behind the common belief that effort is bad, because it means you're not naturally smart or talented enough. It believes that success should be instant. And breeds a fear of failure.

The growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that success always requires effort, failure is a necessary part of the process, and growth is always possible.

While I have a growth mindset in some areas, I  have fixed mindset in others, like my singing. I guess maybe it's because I grew up being told how good I was at singing, and so it became a part of my identity, and I guess failure threatens that.
But it's time to approach musical performance like any other challenge: failure is just the by-product of pushing the envelope.

So bring it on.  I'll keep working on the self-accompaniment as long as there are folks patient enough to put up with my failures.

Come to think of it, that's a big part of my role as a teacher--to put up with my students failures, and not just to put up with them, but encourage them, because failures are necessary stepping stones to success.

Confessions of an over-40 EDM fan

Porter Robinson, Worlds, at Oakdale

Since I was a kid, music and dancing have been a big part of my life. We even had an under-18 dance club for a little while in Killingly, where my friends and I would go to dance to hip-hop tunes like Self Destruction, It Takes two, and Paid in Full.

You would think I'd grow out of all that, but then a student's senior project presentation introduced me to hardstyle (Headhunterz -Power of the Mind). Then came Porter Robinson's early stuff (The State), which led to Skrillex, and then European Electronic Dance Music (EDM) and Armin van Buuren.

Not that I don't have concerns about some aspects of the EDM culture. I do. But those problems (sexism, drug use--language/content warning!) are not unique to this genre, nor are they universal in the movement, and at the same time, there are some really positive aspects. We have work to do in the music scene (and society) in general, but as a whole, trance music has a decidedly positive message and is truly multicultural and unifying, as Skrillex noted in December. There is an open-source culture in the scene, where producers are constantly remixing and building off other's work, and the theme of love and acceptance is palpable at trance events. So if I introduce some folks to the genre, I think it's probably a good thing.

But sometimes I wonder: Aren't I too old for this? Shouldn't I be listening to Bach and Schumann or something, or at least 80's rock?

But I'm not so weird. Turns out that 14% of EDM listeners are over 35, and 18% of DJ magazine's top 100 DJs are over 40. And besides, I don't care, because it's an energizing, immersive, flow-generating experience, and the style I listen to (trance) is typically very positive and uplifting (check out A State of Trance on Spotify). The way I see it, I'll dance until I can't.

Math, music, and life

This stunning visual/auditory bombshell by Nigel John Stanford combines art, science, and electronic music in way I've never seen, and the quote midway through may not be convincing, but it is thought provoking:

"Everything owes its existence solely and completely to sound."

-Peter Guy Manners

I'm not inclined to believe it's all about sound, but I do wonder about waves, or more precisely, equations. Chladni plates have always been one of my favorite links between the world of mathematics and the physical world of the senses, and my absolute favorite demonstration to get students thinking about the connection. Students see the patterns of sand change abruptly as I increase the frequency, and I tell them that atoms and electrons are like this, and that it can all be described by equations.

I think it was Hawking who referred to the universe as a "dance of geometry," and I am inclined to believe that. But is everything really reducible to equations?  Isn't that a low view of life and love and being human?

Is it? I was listening to Protoculture's hard-hitting new track, Music is More Than Mathematics yesterday, and had this thought: Maybe the problem is that we have too low a view of math. Maybe we have too low a view of equations. We see them as hard and cold, inflexible and limited. But maybe we don't see how they can be or could become so much richer than we imagine, that they could contain all of the richness of life and the universe.

What if the richness of music, which after all is just sound waves, were our hint that it really is all about math, but that math is much more than what we think--much more than numbers and letters and symbols and drills and tables and lists? What if math is all about order and beauty and wonder and power and change and vibrancy and life and potential?

And as science and math progress, and our paradigms and pictures of the world shift again and again, and the richness of the picture deepens, and the equations shift from Ptolemy's to Newton's to Einstein's and Schrodinger's and Dirac's, the symphony of nature and life is not silenced, not even just magnified or amplified or clarified, but renewed, transformed, and reborn, every time.