Making Music and Music Making

I remember hearing the word musicing (musicking, musiking) in the late 60s and 70s. At the time I thought of it as a Heideggarian twist, since Heidegger would transform nouns into verbs which often uncovered a more dynamic and deeper sense of the word. Thus world became "worlding" and how the world becomes is uncovered through this shift. Language can help us inquire into the essence of the worlds (worldings) around us, a tool for excavating our sense of reality and beingness.

Musicing becomes the essence of our process and my exploration of this was explored in two manuscripts. One was called Making Music, which I gave to a composer friend as a present. The other was titled Music Making, which I stopped writing when I was about 60% complete. Unfinished business, I suppose. Both were phenomenological explorations of process. Making Music was about the act (the action) of composing, and Music Making was about the act (action) of performing, bringing sound into being from the silence. Both intimately linked, and for me, musicing is the wholeness of that incredibly powerful process.

Perhaps one reason I never finished the second half was the manner in which the idea exploded and imploded all at once, and I found myself overwhelmed at the magnitude of the task, somewhat dwarfed by ambition to probe at the essence of my own working and understanding, and somewhat blinded (deafened?) by the perception that it seemed as though I were trying to count stars, to measure the immeasurable.

Yet, for me there is clearly an extraordinary difference between making music and music making, a difference that is continually expanding and defining itself from moment to moment. "Musicing" becomes a gift of reducing immensity to the simple presence of sound in time, the disclosure of eloquence because the music simply is---and this "is-ing" expresses our human activity of making the music become.