Here’s a second installment of challenging and productive questions for musicians (and other artists) I have drawn from David Byrne’s How Music Works:
What do I need music to do?
What do *we* need music to do?
What is my ministry?
What is my theatrical function?
What is my therapeutic function?
Who am I speaking to?
Who am I speaking for?
How is my music useful to humanity?
As I mentioned yesterday, any good question has multiple answers. I try to *explore* each of these difficult questions, to *essay* them, to approach them as an experiment in progress, an experiment in meaning making, testing and trying out possible answers, knowing full well that whatever answers I can come up with will be tentative, partial, provisional, and ephemeral — nothing declarative or exhaustive or permanent. If we and our work are alive and evolving, the answers to these questions will change over time. It would behoove us, then, to slow down and pay some serious attention to these kinds of questions now, writing down our current answers (however scruffy and imperfect) in a journal, and then coming back again in a year or so to consider them again.