All things related to Karen Kohler’s musings in life artistry and her life arts (lifecraft, lifekraft) training.
Let's face it: some music is really hard on the ears! I don't mean the noise that's out there, I mean the real and serious music. What makes music rough is this beautiful, unstable and highly useful thing called dissonance. In a dissonant chord, the notes aren't aligned harmonically and so the sound is tense and unpleasant. But dissonance [...]
Within us all there is a seed of resplendent life force. We artists feel it especially. This seed lies in its casing, a hard exterior shell. We have to let the flowering take place. For an artist this is always a necessity...this having to bloom. We cannot help it. We can hinder it, prevent it, stifle it, go another way. It does not go [...]
The towering figure called Nelson Mandela has died. This is the poem that got him through prison: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of [...]
My life happens first and my art imitates it. That's the usual way. What I experience becomes my authority in what I bring across on stage, in a scene, a song, a mood, emotion, sentiment, argument. I admit I'm an adventurer, happier on the edge than in the center. Yet anchored in the center with at least one foot, [...]
I witnessed something beautiful the other night in an intimate room here in Manhattan...an error so seamlessly handled as to go almost unnoticed. The singer was turned slightly away from her audience, looking off stage left and sharing a duet with her bassist at the opening of a tune. Their dialogue was sparse and sensual and then, nearly a [...]
Emptiness is the void. Silence is the void. The place of origin from which all comes and to which all returns. Silence is key. Without it there is no music. Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes." Think about that. Music is the silence between the notes. Silence is space, space is physical – the earth, [...]
To become exemplary, an artist cannot imitate, cannot be a carbon copy of someone else. She must present that which is thoroughly unique - herself - and for this she needs to know herself and to continually grow herself. A good singer builds herself a mental reference book. She excels in the art of seeing into someone else's eye [...]
Music begins inside human beings, and so must any instruction. Not at the instrument, not with the first finger, nor with the first position, not with this or that chord. The starting point is one’s own stillness, listening to oneself, the “being ready for music,” listening to one’s own heartbeat and breathing. Carl Orff Watching other artists perform is [...]
