Minahs, Miners, Meantones and Minors

30^th Apr 2007

Minahs, Miners, Meantone and Minors

Sometimes I manage to persuade myself that planning is a really useful approach to life, family, business and everything. But most of the time frankly, I can't be bothered. I am not saying this is a good thing, I am just being honest about it.

If you are a serious planner and if it works for you, please do carry on. If you get bored and you want something else to plan, come and plan some things for me, although I should warn you, that even when I make my own plans, I tend not to follow them very closely.

The thing that occurs to me is this. Well two things actually, but the second is a bit controversial, depending on your religious beliefs, or absence of them.

Firstly, in order to plan you need to now what you want, but lots of planners I know only know what they don't want. Listing everything you don't want in order to find out what you do want is an exercise we have touched on before, but it could take a very long time. For example, I don't want to be savaged by a rabbit with irritable bowel syndrome, but I am not sure this moves me any further forward.

Secondly, no-one planned the universe. I know there is a whole kafuffle about 'intelligent design' going on at the moment, but please! I mean, what supreme being in their right mind would deliberately give boys hair and then, when they reach adulthood, make it all fall out again? And what about blamanche?

That is not to say that I operate on a random basis (well not all of the time). I actually help a lot of businesses do their own planning and I like to think I am pretty good at this process, but it somehow just doesn't appeal to me to apply the same techniques to my own life or business. I mean personally, I don't see what I do as a 'business' anyway. I am me. I like to defy definition. I like things which are as 'insubstantial as the air' (I think that's from MacBeth but I haven't got time to check today - answers on a post card).

What does appeal to me (apart from hair, but definitely NOT blamanche) is knowing roughly where I am going; having a general sense of direction; preferably a positive one. I like to think about what I would like my life to be like.

Now you have to be a bit careful, even with this, because you could end up spending a lot of time thinking about what you would like your life to be like and not noticing what it is like now.

No doubt I have quoted this before, but it is worth quoting again. In Aldous Huxley's 'Island' there are minah birds all over the utopian island which have been trained to shout 'pay attention!"

Your life is happening now; not yesterday; not tomorrow. Now. Having said this, having a sense of direction helps us in making choices and decisions, but to quote Michael Neill (who is quoting somebody else I think, because he often is), you can get all the way across the American continent, from one side to the other, and only ever be able to see 20 yards in front of your face. And it's true. You can; as long as you decide that's where you are going; to the other side of the American continent.

Personally I can think of better places to go.

I like to go down deep. Down deep there are many interesting things which help me to set out some kind of a direction and to achieve my goals. If I believed in past lives I might believe I was once a miner, because miners go down deep in order to extract value and bring it back up to the surface. I mean, imagine a planet where no-one mined anything....we would be a bit short on resources. The brilliant thing about mining is that even when you don't know what's down there, you can always be sure, if you use the correct mining techniques, that there will be some value to be had. Put simply, the correct mining techniques are the ones which access the best stuff, quickest. Decide what it is you want, positively; think about a time and a place when you had something similar before (or imagine one); select your site; go get it.

On the other hand, if you want to get all scientific about it you can; but beware! Some people spend their entire lives procrastinating over where to sink a mine shaft and never get off the surface. These are the people who drill bore holes endlessly. Such tentativeness may avoid expensive mistakes, but this is not my idea of a great epitaph.....

Harvey Taylor RIP......'he avoided expensive mistakes'.

If you drill bore holes, expect to be bored. People who drill bore holes end up with holes and not else. Maybe that's why they call them bore holes. I mean if you want to spend days and weeks and months and (....some people I know...) even YEARS, boring all the way down into your past to dredge up some unremittingly boring and unpleasant stuff in order to understand the full and distressingly detailed etiology (look it up on the web) of your current indecision, you can; but personally I recommend you buy a miners' helmet, a shovel and a lamp and start looking for gold; much more useful.

The thing is, no bore hole ever really got down to the core of the problem and even if it did, it doesn't tell you what the solution is. You still have to find the resources you need to achieve whatever it is you really want to achieve. Did you know that, on a planet where the surface is approximately 4000 miles from the core, the deepest bore hole ever drilled, the Kola 'Superdeep' Bore hole, is only 7.6 miles deep! Bore holes! Deep! Pah!

I can go much deeper than that just by closing my eyes and thinking of a time when........you see, I already have all the resources I need. So do you.

A 'RE-source' is a source of wisdom, knowledge, skill and/or belief which you have already sourced once, or which at least one of the other 6.5 billion people on the planet, or their ancestors, have mined at some time in the past (or the future, interestingly). And a resource of wisdom, knowledge, skill and/or belief does not require knowledge of what went wrong; just how to do things in a way which works. Of course you only get to find out if it works by taking action.

Like Johan Sebastian Bach. Remember him? He took action. A lot of action. One of the actions he took was to write 'The Well Tempered Clavier'. So much politer than some grumpy old clavier, don't you think? What this actually means is that Bach was writing music for the 'well tempered' tuning system in which each note in all of the key signatures (A to G) sounded in tune. The alternative approach in Bach's day was something called 'meantone temperament' in which key signatures with many sharps and flats sounded out of tune. You can tell it wasn't any good. Who wants meanness as a guide to life?

Now I don't want to bamboozle you all with musical technicalities, but just bear this in mind. Up until Bach (1685 - 1750), most people were struggling with a system of tuning that didn't work. The well-tempered tuning system, by contrast, not only sounded better, it is also mathematically logical. Each note maintains a precise mathematical relationship, in proportion with every other note, in terms of the frequency of vibrations per second each separate note generates. The old system just sounded 'off key' - plainly and simply - just wrong.

But it was what people were used to. You know how that works. I get stressed out, feel a bit desperate, drink too much alcohol and eat too much chocolate....it feels kind of wrong....but it's what I do well....and the next day I wake up feeling slightly more stressed....repeat the whole process....and so it goes on, day after day, year after year, century after century.

Bach realised he had to do something to break the pattern. So what did he do? He wrote 24 preludes and fugues, one in each available key within the new, well-tempered tuning system. And then, just to make sure that no-one could ignore this, he did it all again, thus creating the famous 48 Preludes and Fugues of which 'The Well Tempered Clavier' is comprised.

There are, perhaps, a few of you sitting there thinking this is an apposite example which challenges my lack of commitment to planning and my previous diatribes about the iniquities of the super-ego. Well, if he had just written 48 fugues, then perhaps you would be right to be smug. After all, a fugue is one of the most anally retentive musical forms ever created, but nonetheless brilliant. Alas, your smugness is misplaced! Bach also wrote 48 preludes. Many of these preludes were little more than spontaneous, but brilliant, free improvisations, of which modern day, avant garde jazz musicians would have been proud. No detailed planning. No obsessive attention to strict musical form; just free flowing outpourings from the soul which he happened to be smart enough to write down.

Others of you, however, may still be stuck on where he got 24 different key signatures from. After all, if you count up all the white notes and all the black notes on a piano (A to G), these only add up to 12 before the whole sequence starts again within the next octave.

Well, he got 24 because he wrote 12 in major keys and then the other 12 in minor keys (and then did it all again to get to 48).

But what is a MINOR key? Is it a key signature which is less important then a MAJOR key? Is it somehow inferior? Well no. I like to think of a minor key as simply being a slightly more circuitous (and therefore, probably, more realistic) way of reaching resolution.

All music (and probably all of life, physics, the universe, everything) is based on the principle of tension and release. In western classical music (and jazz, pop, rock and so on), a 'key' note is established early on in the piece. From then on, every note in the piece seems to want to resolve towards that key note. The notes which are played sound more or less 'consonant' according to the specific (mathematical) relationship they have with the 'key' note. Dissonance, cleverly used, is tolerable because the composer has led us away from the key note in such a way that we can still relate the dissonant notes back to the original key (most of us do this unconsciously). Random notes, on the other hand, sound random, because there is no 'trail' of past or future relationship and no sense in which they can 'resolve' back towards the original key note. In non-Western music, similar effects are achieved not through the relationship of note pitches (harmony), but through similarly complex rhythmic and/or melodic relationships. Indian music is much more melodically complex because they use more notes at pitches intervening the 12 notes to which we are accustomed. Some music embraces all three elements (harmony, rhythm and melody) at a complex level.

Anyway, a MINOR key sounds minor because the relationship of certain notes (notably the third, and seventh) with the key note is less directly proportional in terms of frequencies of vibration, so the sense of tension is stretched out more.

There is one other musical device Bach was also a master of, which I would like to draw your attention to before moving onto something less esoteric. He was very fond of the Tierce di Picardy.

No, the Tierce di Picardy is not a form of Italian Blamanche. It is a simple musical device whereby a piece of music (typically a Bach chorale) in a minor key resolves at the end, onto a major triad of the same key note. Hence a piece of music in C minor finally ends, satisfyingly and a little surprisingly, on a C major chord. This makes the resolution of the harmonic tension built throughout the piece somehow sound even more satisfying and reassuring. Not only have we arrived at the right place, but we have ended on a major triad chord in which the three notes of the major triad are in perfect proportion to one another.

This brings us full circle.

Having a sense of what key we are in - that is, knowing which are the important, stabilising, secure notes which we can resort to in times of musical confusion, knowing that they will sound 'right' - is what enables us to take off on more spontaneous improvisatory excursions, into uncharted realms, without the need of endless bore holes. Having a sense of direction, a final chord, to which we aspire, helps us to navigate a pathway back if, like all good risk takers, we are sometimes drawn off the beaten track by something interestingly different and potentially life enhancing.

I know roughly what key my life is in. I have some idea about which are the important and less important notes. I am learning new keyboard techniques everyday. Providing I am using a 'well-tempered' tuning system and paying sufficient attention to my own intonation, I am confident I will achieve everything I want to achieve. I may need to play with other musicians and this may require some more attention to the principles of harmony, timing and technique, but if you have ever heard freely improvising musicians in performance, you will know that the only difference between an excellent musical performance and one which sucks, is not the exteemities of dissonance or creative tension which they explore, but the extent to which each participating musician listens to and responds to each other musician involved, as opposed to wallowing in self-indulgence.

If you would like to explore this further, have a go at the following exercise, which is my alternative 'planning' regime. If you are feeling depressed, go for a walk first and look at the sky and breathe in fresh air. If you are really, really depressed, don't do this exercise, but do some physical exercise to help yourself along with whatever else you have been prescribed by someone qualified to prescribe it!

STEP 1

Get your mining gear on (metaphorically speaking). Sit somewhere where you will not be disturbed. Set yourself a positive direction before you begin. For example, you could decide that you are going to journey 1 - 5 years into the future and that you want to get some idea of what you want it to be like, and what your next step or two will be, towards this positive future. Remind yourself of the important key elements of your life (family, friends, values, guiding beliefs, activities, health, material and, if applicable, spiritual goals).

STEP 2

Stare at a spot on the ceiling until you cannot keep your eyes open any longer and let them close as you go down deep..... or up...... or whichever way appeals to you. But go in the direction where your future is, one to five years from now.

STEP 3

Take a look (from the outside looking in) at what you are doing 5 years from now. Who is with you? What are you doing? What can you hear? Where are you? Make it as big and as bold and as bright and as clear and as detailed as you can, but no more than you can.

STEP 4

Step into the 'future you' and see what you can see and hear what you can hear, and feel what you can feel.

STEP 5

When you have got it as clear as it is going to get and when you are quite sure that this is all in the right relationship to your life's 'key signature', float off again to an external vantage point (maybe above, or below, or to one side), and bring with you all, and only all, the positive sensations that you have experienced in your future.

STEP 6

Now look back along the route you will have travelled to reach your one to five year future and ask that part of your mind which knows the answers to all of these things, what one thing you could do right now that will help you to move towards this positive future? If you are really clear about that one thing, then you can ask for another one, or maybe even a couple more, but do one at a time.

STEP 7

Do it!

STEP 8

Come on The HBT Self-Hypnosis Programme, Saturday/Sunday 21/22 July 2007, in Bournemouth to learn the easy way to make changes to life-long habits, achieve your goals, or simply relax and enjoy life. Click here for details, or go straight to the booking form to BOOK now!

STEP 9

Book onto the Achieving Peak Performance,Wednesday 20 June, 2007, Bournemouth for directors and managers who want to achieve their goals more efficiently, dynamically and enjoyably. Click here for details, or go straight to the booking form to BOOK now!

Book both and get a 20% discount on both workshops

Until next time.....

A NOTE ABOUT COPYRIGHT:

Basically, I work on 'abundance mentality'. The more I share, the more comes back to me. There a couple of rules I would like you to observe.

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