Destroying Textbook Rules Part I - In-The-Moment Creativity And Expressive Freedom: A Case For Musical Adventurism And Free-Form Music

For the love of freedom in music

The above performance is the first-ever live version of Into The Rabbit Hole.

The spirit of the track originated in my departure from fixed-form music writing.

As the opener of my Out Of The Blue album, it’s full of musical adventurism.

I always loved to improvise.

Even at a young age, when I started to play piano at age seven, I always deviated from the black dots on the sheet music.

The track Into The Rabbit Hole serves as a testimony of my escape from conformity in music.

Seeing Keith Jarrett in concert years ago, I was always mesmerized by his improvisations.

To be honest, I probably spend more time improvising on the guitar than developing any other skill (guitar technique might be the exception).

But when writing music, I always fell back to more traditional forms.

A big turnaround point came when I started dismantling music to its core elements (rhythm, harmony, melody) and conforming to only one of these elements.

The pic below is one of my early experiments where I only worked with simple harmonies to structure the songs on Out Of The Blue:

On a non-musical level, my inner awakening in music corresponded with my spiritual awakening.

A return to the magic of life, so to speak.

First, this happened:

I got kids.

And I witnessed them playing with the magic of life.

I realized there was something profound I lost along the way…

Something I needed to regain.

When we visited a local amusement park (De Efteling, in The Netherlands), this quote was on one of the indoor rides:

It says:

Cherish your fantasy, the source of all magic

I believe now that the belief in magic needs to be a way of life for me to reach both my musical and personal goals.

Moreover, expressive freedom and in-the-moment creativity are the number one denominators of anything I touch as an artist.

So the songs I compose are more like ‘canvasses’ where I paint with sounds on.

I stumbled on this great quote:

I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing that can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms

- Claude Debussy

On the topic of kids and education:

I believe we underestimate the importance of soft skills developing through play, roleplaying, and improvising and oversell our kids on the hard skills.

Play is really how kids learn and I find it disheartening to see this being subtracted from the equation in school.

So Into The Rabbit Hole (from the above performance) is a dive into the adventurous world of destroying textbook rules.

It’s about seeing what’s left of you if you lose your inhibitions and return to a child-like state.

I believe we are guided in life.

Our life’s mission is written in the stars and we can’t go against the currents of life.

For a long moment, I didn’t know where life would lead me.

Jumping into that hole was scary at first.

But now I found the hole I stumbled in to be a gateway to a fantastic world.

It’s the world that resides within.

Thanks for reading and listening!

It means a lot to me!!

🎧 Listen to the Full Album on all major streaming services now: https://share.amuse.io/album/antony-reynaert-out-of-the-blue

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