Final blog post

https://www.instagram.com/gastonstrumpet/

This term, my project of improvising on the trumpet for 1 minute allowed me to express my artistic spirit in a way I hadn’t done before. These simple nuggets of creativity made it easier to create, in that the goal was less daunting and more manageable. Doing this project also gave me a space to create without judgment, which I have always struggled with. The only requirement is that the music had to be 1 minute long. This limit freed me up to explore in non-judgmental ways, because all the pieces were equally valid. In one example, I played around with randomly overlaying related improvisations to create a new texture. It may have sounded dissonant, but it was entirely new. This initial exploration led me to create the last post, “farewell, farewell forever”, in which I improvised with a chorale from the 1600s and made it my own. This idea was also inspired by the Jurgenson text, in which he says, “photographic images, even after digital manipulation, always draw inspiration from both “scribe” and “poet” at once, varying in proportion depending on their subject and audience” (99). This also relates to his ideas of the social photo as “performative fiction,” which makes me think about how maybe all music is performative fiction, but perhaps that is what makes music authentic. Perhaps authenticity in art is not trying to capture ultimate truth but the pursuit of performing fictions. In these 1-minute improvisations, I felt more connected to my instrument and my artistic sensibilities than I have in a while, and they gave me a space to dive more deeply into my artistry. 


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