Full Moon Update – March

March 2, 2018

3 minute read

Wake up Screaming
Full Moon Update – March

This Month’s Theme: Music & Movement
Deadline: Midday (GMT) 14th March

Welcome to a snowy Full Moon update.

The intention for the current edition of Wake up screaming, Music and Movement, is to investigate our relationship with music and to encourage more productivity in the musical domain. We want to explore new musical ideas, investigate music philosophy, its relationship to art and language and to ponder over music as a tool for personal development.

I have written songs since I could play three chords on the guitar, it was like a latent drive that broke through some time in my early twenties. More recently, musical exploration has taken a back seat to other forms of creativity, quite organically but nonetheless frustratingly. With the aim of reinvigorating my musical output, I decided to dedicate a Month and a Wake up screaming edition to the subject, and see what happens.

Over the last two weeks, I have been practising the guitar daily, listening to some old recordings, watching lectures on the philosophy of music (a little reading list is included below). I have pondered on how songwriting and musical practice has nourished me internally and externally and how I might take action to ensure it continues to do that.

Learning a musical instrument was one of the most elevating things I ever did. I learned I had rhythm and poetry and a natural feeling for sound. Creating music connected me with myself and others, it introduced me to meditation, to dance, and provided a very accessible and entertaining way to explore my inner world and to reflect my emotions into the outer world.

Here is a song written in November 2017 called moving mountains, that helped me to deal with the long cold months of winter. It was like a mantra that kept me motivated towards my goals while realising that to some (my nan for example) my life looks like I’m moving mountains, exploring the world, adventuring, learning, while to others I am just pushing a boulder up a hill.

One of the biggest challenges in my personal development has been to do with communication, in my young adulthood I often kept things under wraps, I was quiet and reserved and very reluctant to talk about feelings, especially negative ones. It seemed that songwriting provided an outlet for me to communicate my innermost thoughts and desires without fear of a response or conflict. In this space, I could be truly honest with myself and others. I now understand songwriting as a manifestation of my need to vocalise emotions, put myself under the microscope and bring thought processes out into the external.

I have always felt that music orders the mind in some way that is beyond our grasp. Far beyond the vibration of an eardrum, of cells, or molecules in our body, music vibrates our emotions and reaches right into our core. Maybe that’s because our being is a very dense form of music?

Songwriting is a cathartic practice and music is a therapist. It feels like the songs I write represent some sort of energetic expulsion or emotional resolution, or sometimes even messages from the deep that only come to be fully understood in retrospect. They are mini-epiphanies, mantras helping me to come to terms with erratic emotions, putting them on to paper, into word and out into the world.

Music seems to me to be a catalyst for emotional expression and the formation of new ideas in word, leading me to question the distinction between music and language, music and word. Perhaps music is where language originated?

Over the next two weeks, I will explore these themes further. I hope to record at least one new song, with words. To satisfy the purist in me, who might consider any music accompanied by word as “not real music”, I am also pursuing my interest in instrumental pieces, experimenting with the communication of a meaningful piece that includes no words. Where movement figures in all this, I am not quite sure yet, but one acquaintance just asked the question “movement in terms of politics?”, which opened up some new areas of thinking.

I will continue to explore my relationship with music over the next two weeks. If you would like to join me then please send your submission to matt@wakeupscreaming.com

See you soon.

Matt Witt

Reading List – Lectures
Jordan Petersen – “The meaning of Music”
James Rhodes – Music and the inner self – TED
Lydia Goehr – Philosophy of music, politics of music

Call for artists

#8 – Music & Movement – Submissions open

Deadline: Midday, Wed 14th Feb 2018

Release: New moon – Thu 15th Feb 2018

#8: Music & Movement – What is music, where does it exist, what does it represent? We want to dig around in the emotional aspects of music and sound. We want to investigate movement in relationship to sound, in terms of bodily motion, travel, emotional movement, dance.

Visual pieces, illustration, painting, drawings, animation, music, sound, video, multimedia, films, installations, movement, dance, noise, soundscapes, songs, collaboration, creative writing, poetry and short articles < 600 words.

We are not necessarily looking for sound-based contributions, although we will publish some music and sound. We are also looking for work in other mediums that are somehow inspired by or linked to music, how is music inspiring your visual art? How can we bring together music with other forms?

Please view our submission guidelines and previous editions before submitting your work.