10/02/17 10:14 pm EST
Note: I've begun restoring posts from Killeans Row until there is time to find a new home for the site. This was originally posted in January 2015 .The irony here is encompassed by the multi-debacle that was our 2016 ( more like a nightmarish financial re-enactement of 2008 ! ) and subsequent relighting of all these projects that is just beginning now. The original article video link is for the full LTE show in NYC that you can find here
One additional note. An underlying reality is that the single biggest arbiter of projects like these going forward isn't talent , intelligence or determination - it's finances. Musicians know this one by heart , but of course they're not alone. If your a working class 99%er or have an independent streak you know the drill. The challenges never stop.
Putting music , musicianship , tennis , training and research on the same page might seem a bit of a stretch until we identify the common threads running through all of these things . At first the cognition involved in pushing past one's own limitations to understand a difficult problem in physics doesn't seem much related to a topspin serve out wide or trying to parse just what the hell Jordan Rudess was doing in that last blazing run. In truth it is hard - hard because we tend to neurologically compartmentalize difficult skills in differing ways ; being immersed in solving difficult maths may not at first be at all simpatico with the things we attend when composing or performing a piece of music. In fact I've found it at times extremely difficult to attend research tasks without putting music down completely until those things are "out of the way" .
But some very interesting performance related tweaks do tend to happen when you force yourself to multitask in exactly that way - trying to squeeze all of those things into a 24 hour day. Under pressure of deadlines tasks clash to the point of psychological discomfort.But keep at it long enough and you start seeing peaks in performance spread out amongs't the different skill sets your trying to master. So in some sense this is about meeting very difficult physical and mental challenges head on. In a more clinical sense it's about the science of human performance and to an unexpected degree sports science , training and fitness at least as much as it is about music. Building a proper platform to flesh all this out coincidentally allows me to finally dedicate more time to being a musician again and this site is an important part of that. It's been a long time coming.
There are abundant examples out there of the link between musical performance and all out athleticism for those wanting to explore these areas. One of my favorite examples of those connections is this video of Liquid Tension Experiment performing live in NYC . This performance is an insanely creative and beautiful prog workout with the last thing on the set list being an over the top performance of Rhapsody in Blue . Liquid Tension Experiment is Jordan Rudess , John Petrucci , Tony Levin and Mike Portnoy :
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