I mentally understand and have a strong map of the Menkyo system to the extent that it has been shared with me. Throughout my dabblings in the world of popular music, I've applied my basic understanding of these five phases of learning and development. In the particular area of songwriting, a number of components from Kata lend themselves to a clear comparison.
Please keep in mind that I started thinking this through around age fifteen, with no concern for the blasphemy, think-crime, or political faux-pas that I might be committing in the process. Perhaps my only mistake is to share these thoughts here, but what the heck...
I'm not trying to imply in this section that I'm a music-meijin or that my experience in music has replaced any of my need to learn and grow in the Martial Arts. I am saying that my knowledge from Karate has provided a helpful framework from which to learn, understand, and enjoy many other art-forms and that this is a somewhat thought-out example that I've used for years.
My original interest in music was the lyrics. I recall with a smile
the eighth-grade English class assignments in poetry and creative
writing where I integrated concepts from my old
passion--Karate![[*]](foot_motif.gif){kind=small}
, and my latest interest--rock `n roll.
Remember that the Aoinagi Karate UCSD environment for me during these
years was one in which I'd be driven over to a house full of college
students living together in a place of exciting loud music played
before and after training. Like most
children, I look up to, admire, and imitate people just a bit
older--like these way-cool college guys who lived the Karate life at
Sempai's home and were always interested in music.
Without any involvement or interest in music, other than an occasional glimpse of this new phenomenon called MTV at friend's homes who had cable, I started signing up to perform in lip-syncing and air-guitar contests held during school lunch. The purpose of these contests, I now understand, is for people to dress up in drag or in crazy outfits, play hilariously inappropriate music, and bring smiles to the faces of friends in the audience.
At the time, I was dead-serious about it, showing up with tapes of serious music lamenting social ills, dressed in the least impressive costume, and boring the captive lunchtime audiences of 600 or so junior-high classmates for five minutes at a stretch. A serious exercise in pure imitation, that thankfully led to some much more rewarding imitation and experience with the real thing.
When I was fifteen, Sempai Neville was returning an acoustic guitar he had borrowed and asked me if I played any instruments. I was ashamed to answer `no.' Suggestions from Karate worked pretty literally then, so a few weeks later for my sixteenth birthday I asked for a drum set, taxing my folks' budget but they managed to find one at an auction that they could afford.
Pretty direct connection between my participation in Karate and my involvement in music beyond a lyrical appreciation. To the dismay of my parents, brothers, and neighbors, I launched into some intense combinations of learning the drums by imitation and learning by experience. Teenagers are so rude. I think my family went through some dinners with cotton in their ears as I banged away in the adjacent room, quickly destroying the family's low-powered hifi by playing along--imitating the music of my heroes at tinnitus-inducing volume.
I wasn't alone in these musical adventures, both of my brothers played complementary instruments-piano, keyboards, and bass. Jamming after school was one of the few things we had in common during our teenage years. The combined effect on the neighborhood was too much, and within a few months my parents did some drastic refinancing (a second mortgage or something) and hired a contractor to turn our garage into a soundproof music studio--later enabling what I've labeled the creation parallel.
Just like Karate, music had its Kihon, Kata, and Kumite. I've always mapped the basic skills needed to sing or play an instrument to the Kihon, the cacophonic crime of playing out loud to Kumite, and the patterns, performance, and creation of songs to Kata.
After a few months of learning to play instruments alone, I was ready to team up with some friends from school and really make headaches. The `Imitation' phase kicked in all over again as we taught ourselves to play the songs of our heroes, playing tapes and records over and over to learn the chords and words.
I started to recognize what might be considered `Experiential' aspects around this time, in two flavors:
This comfortably maps over to the idea of learning through experience, but doesn't sound too severe. After all, in Karate, the experiential phase is also called `severe training.'
In the rock-music and songwriting analogy, I've had some severe lump-in-my throat experiences that definitely count for something, although without the help of a parallel Sensei (never found the parallel for a Sensei in the music model!) I can't interpret them as well or learn from them as much as I might be able to. Major experiences related to my life in Music that I can recall as I wind down this marathon essay-writing exercise include
The learn-through-teaching analogy with the Menkyo system doesn't perfectly apply to my own musical experience, since I've never clearly taught music to anyone. If we consider the related skills such as managing the relationships in a band of musicians, the collaborative songwriting process, and the technical recording processes, I can map it a little better since these are things I have shared with others.
The experience of learning and controlling group dynamics, group politics, and decision making are very valuable and have direct parallels to the experience of being in a Kata-team with Sensei Neville Billimoria, Paul Billimoria, Tim Kippen, Dan Lewis, and Paul Schwartz on and off since 1988.
As you can probably predict, I map `songwriting' to the Menkyo system's phase of learning through creation. I've always looked at it that way. It is the most fascinating and meaningful parallel for me, and the most rewarding part of my adventures in music. I've been creating original expressions of melody and words since almost the first day. I Learned everything I know about music without formal education and only my parallel knowledge in karate to compare with.
I've always written songs using direct (and probably limiting and inappropriate) parallels. The technical components of Kata map over to the technical elements of songwriting--imagine how songwriting must lay itself out when you begin with a borrowed toolkit filled with concepts like timing, pause, slow movement, contrast, feeling, and moral, mathematical, and natural themes.
The thematic parallels offer more interesting analogies. I've tried to write songs that express my interpretation of a particular Kata. I've often borrowed from my understanding of the Kata-creation process to write songs in a similar way--sometimes building epic poems with multiple musical parts to express an idea, then condensing it into a three-minute package to share with others.
Earlier I mentioned the soundproof music room in our garage. Having a soundproof room is a god-send for a teenager interested in exploring some very new and hormonally turbocharged feelings--no, I'm not saying the room doubled as a place to have loud sex, it was a place to pick up any musical instrument I wanted, make all kinds of compositionally-illegal and foul noises, and sing out loud the most pathetic and un-poetic expressions of awkward teenage angst that you've never heard to this day.
I would never have been brave enough to try singing or songwriting without this protected environment. Maybe to replicate this in Karate I need to lock myself in a padded room and spaz out. I've tried my hand and throat at expressing a wide range of feelings and experiences in my life. Trying to articulate elusive feelings and themes is incredibly challenging, and makes me realize how limiting any language can be--a barrier to the expression of emotion.
As I mentioned once during a discussion of expression (and how we'd spend a million dollars) in Sensei's Summer-camp apartment one year, I find it easiest to write songs when I have a problem. Anger and frustration seem to lend themselves easily to expression. Reminds me of Darth Vader tempting his son Luke to get angry in The Empire Strikes Back I'm not sure if this is telling me something about the English language, the precedent set by other angry rock`n roll artists, or about my own ability to share my feelings. I've had a lot of confused emotions that seem to clear themselves up after singing about them--some come out with simple, direct themes like Kata I've learned, others are still a jumble to others but give me a real emotional outlet when I sing them. I've opened a computer file of my lyrics and will share a few themes here...
If songs were Kata and songwriters maintained 54 songs, three original, I'd be a little over-prolific in the creativity department. I think I lost count after 50 songs and have probably recorded more than 75 with various bands, some of them still recall the original intended expression for me very well, (like a good Kata recalls something for me, English doesn't really have the words for it) and a few are meaningful enough that I'd be willing to share them with others.
Imagine my pride and pleasure when I took my first formal music/songwriting class at UCSD in the summer of 1991 or 1992--and received one of my few A+ grades in college. My chances of entering the creative phase of the Menkyo system as a Karate student are slim and years away if ever. I've enjoyed creating music and interpreting the process through all five phases of learning.
I probably shouldn't write this section. In fact, I think I'll take the paragraphs below and integrate them with the sections above. I'm not sure how the Sensei would take it if I was arrogant enough to fill in my inkling of this parallel. On second thought, it's getting late (early, actually), and I've probably lost the reader by now anyway. So here's the un-perfected thoughts, not-ready-for prime-time, mapping consistently to the fact that I'm not especially ready for the exam today.
Just as my motives for participating in Karate have evolved and changed over the years, my present appreciation for music is growing evolving away from a delight in the clear intellectual articulation of lyrics and towards a relationship with the musician herself. When I go back and listen to certain songs that turned me on years ago, I rarely have the patience to sit through them anymore. The words might be good, but they don't make the spiritual connection that I'm interested in. Same for my own songs.
My recent attempts at musical expression are less concerned with communicating anything clearly and more of an attempt to relate or connect with my state of being. I don't especially care anymore if things come out as sense or nonsense or are melodic or not. By all technical interpretation this is a major setback. In my efforts to write songs that express, I've arrived over and over at the conclusion that my English vocabulary and my 12-chord musical vocabulary don't do justice to much of what runs through my heart, soul, brain, and body throughout my life. I suppose I could go pick a Music degree and an English degree, but I'd probably end up with just a few more notes and words to bitch about not being able to use to express deeper emotions.
I wonder if Sensei in the Creation phase have similar roadblocks. My grandpa used to tell me all the great songwriters he knew would create a song a day, even if the `song' was utter crap. I tried it myself and was pleased with the results. I wrote lots of crummy songs, always keeping my tool-set and vocabulary for songwriting fresh. When important things inspired me to really work on a lyric and song, it would often fall together almost magically. The building blocks are always available, and when inspiration strikes the structure and technical details can be used as a natural means of expression, rather than coming from forced thought. I liken this to spontaneous Kata creation. No wonder Matsumura could honestly say that Bassai Dai came to him in a dream.
Ah... you see, I still don't have a whole lot of insight into the application of learning Music through Being. I just rambled about more creative stuff. I think all these musical experiments help my understanding of the Menkyo system in some small way, although I may not know exactly how or how much for years to come.