We don’t live in the information age. We live in the extraneous information age.
The era of information overload is upon us, and the reason isn’t because of how much information there is. It’s because of how music irrelevant information we have to process each day. Extraneous information: the noise that would have been filtered out, when a newspaper was your only source of news. It’s the news articles that get superseded by newer information but are still put in front of us, so we have to process it.
It’s true in music, too – we have so much extraneous music in our lives. The background sounds and music of devices, TV shows, offices, elevators, and on and on.
Music-making–focusing on purpose on certain music that is utterly relevant to our existence in that moment–is a cure to the extraneous. It brings a focus that I find almost nowhere else in my existence.
When we make music together, we set aside the extraneous and consider the essential.