Bach (again) and Plato

"Two things," I told Larry, last night.

(You have figured out that we tend to think in lists, separately and together.)

"First, the thing we were talking about, one-on-one teaching-and-learning, it has a name. Dialectics. Which means I need to read Plato."

"I've never read Plato."

"I know," I said. "We need to read it. Because it's like, you know, the idea that two people come together to solve a problem through inquiry, and although there can be a teacher and a student, both parties have to be ready to learn."

"Because they might discover something new together."

"Exactly," I said. "Also, the second thing, the next thirty-two measures of the King's song are a three-part invention, with P1 as one voice and P2 as the other voice and the King as the third voice, which means I need to play a bunch of Bach three-part inventions."

I started on Plato this morning and I'm going to start on Bach this afternoon. I have a sense that I will be successful, because what I'm doing in both cases is not arbitrary but functional.

Arbitrary isn't the right word, though. I'm only thinking of it because of what I wrote about SIX, yesterday.

Meaningless would be a more appropriate word, and every piano teacher that's ever assigned a recalcitrant high-school student a two-part invention would say "those aren't meaningless, they're developmentally appropriate pedagogical tools!"

But I think – and I won't be able to prove this until I play a three-part invention – that developmentally appropriate correlates pretty much directly with what you want to learn next, and it also seems like learning happens pretty much immediately when you have both the motivation and the prerequisites.

(Ask me how quickly I learned that Handel, once I realized that I could use it to study the physicality of "musical drama," which at the time Handel believed he was inventing.)

(Also ask me how quickly I learned the accompaniments for SIX auditions, or the music I'm going to play on the organ in a few weeks.)

So, right now, I am motivated to write the King's song.

The prerequisite is learning more about Bach three-part inventions.

The prerequisite for that is sitting down and playing one and analyzing it as carefully as I've been analyzing theater songs. How does form connect to attention, and how does attention yield transfer of meaning, and is there any point at which the invention loses its audience?

I mean, I could just jank out something that sounds Bach-y, but that would be way way way way way less fun.

(Plus I get to use anything I learn for my church music gig, which makes me even more motivated.)

At any rate you get the idea –

and now I get to go play and Plato for a while. ❤️

(p.s. I went to my voice lesson and ha ha ah aha haha hah aha I cannot believe I told you I had learned the Handel just because I knew all of the notes and the words, my voice teacher was all "now we are going to talk about biometrics" and suddenly a new level of learning appeared on the horizon.)