Postcard #3

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. ~Charlie Parker

Music is a big part of my life. My dad was a professional popular musician in Korea in the 1970’s and my mother, who plays the piano and sings, is very musical as well. So needless to say, I had much music around me all my life. I guess I can say my life so far has been, and continues to be, a performative inquiry on what music is to me: a way of knowing. Sure, some people, commonly called “prodigies” show much talent and insight at a very young age. However, for most people, and also definitely for those prodigies, by living the life, you become who you are and your art form forms itself as well. The art form does not exist without your presence, without your knowledge, without your soul. You are who you are because of who you are. You who have gone through all that you have gone through… and here you are: a beautiful art form.
Here are Charlie Parker (alto saxophone) and Miles Davis (trumpet) during a recording session sometime in the 1940’s. They lived their life searching, discovering, learning, and inventing music most notably the jazz style, bebop. All the things they experienced and learned as individuals collectively became one of the most valued and respected music of all times. Performative inquiry, as a way of “knowing” and knowing through “doing,” the artists become the art from. They know as they do, and do as they know. That is how they find their craft and their voice. As Parker and Davis, and many other great musicians/artists, are the art form as musicians, they have become the performative inquiry. Alive/living. It evolves into other peoples’ performative inquiry.