Speed, speed, speed

So you play a musical instrument huh? And you spend hours practicing trying to reach your goal. You realize that it's surprisingly hard and consider the idea of giving it up. In the end, for some reason you asume that the hardest things to play are necessarily the best examples of good music. That leads me to the next question:

What is music?

Well, honestly... I don't know. I can't tell you what music is. But can tell you how I understand the word.
To me, music consists (more or less) in combining sounds and silences with the purpose of creating an esthetical experience in any living organism with the capability of interpreting it as a logical structure with sense and meaning (such as melodies, rhythms, harmonies, or any kind of combination including any of those).

Feel free to share your own idea or definition with me. I'll be more than glad to read it.

To me, music has lots of avialable resources (as many as you get to imagine) for you to use (or not) that will help you in the creation of your little esthetical sound structure. I wanted to talk to you about one of those resources:

Speed.

As I said before, there's a lot of people who asume that the hardest things to play are necessarily the best examples of good music. Having said that music is probably too complex for an ordinary human being like me to define, I'll try to make my point using a simple analogy.

Picture a very intelligent and educated guy. He has a rich vocabulary and knows all kinds of complex and elaborated words. But he knows when to use them, because part of being smart is undertanding the context you're in so you know how to keep people following you.

A person who always uses complex and sophisticated words, no matter the context, is probably just someone trying to impress other people. Following this line of logic, a rich vocabulary is only one of the resources of your intelligence. To asume that someone is incredibly intelligent because he uses lots of weird words you don't understand, is as ridiculous as asuming that someone is a great musician because he can play fast.

Wow! You play so fast you must be the best musician ever!

In fact, playing slow could be even more challenging, because you are practically forced to create a melody in order to do something you or other people might want to hear again. But I'm not saying that speed is shit. I'm just saying don't get too excited about it.

Some examples of fast and good musical pieces (according to me):

- Far Beyond The Sun (Yngwie Malmsteen)
- Child In Time (Deep Purple, Made in Japan version)
- Capriche No. 24 (Niccolò Paganini)

Some examples of slow and good musical pieces (according to me):

- Europa (Carlos Santana)
- Moonlight Sonata (Ludwig van Beethoven)
- Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Pink Floyd)

I think you should keep that in mind before you start showing off on stage with a few senseless speed excercises... but must admit it can be fun sometimes :P

So tell me now, are you a machine or a human being? Are you a reproducer or a creator? Are you a player or a musician?