Embarking on Musical Escapades

From the Castle of Creativity

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Escape. What does that word mean to you? Well, that tiny word from my Castle of Creativity had such a need to travel it kept falling out of its window. For the first few months I’d pick it up off the floor and pop it back in, but then one day…it disappeared. 

Where did it go? I like to think it’s been on a trip around the world, taking steamships and trains, flying in hot air balloons and riding camels in the Sahara. Just imagine the soundtrack for such an adventure! The countryside alone conjures soundscapes from Borodin’s String Quartet, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro or the Grieg’s Holberg suite. In fact, that’s something I need to make a list of—those uplifting movements of pieces that lead us onwards towards adventure…

You see, in my mind, escape means adventure. Whether that’s travelling to other countries, getting lost in history or solving mysteries, imagining myself living in the times of classical composers…that’s my kind of fun. And the best part is I can escape whenever I like!

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post inspired by words from the Castle of Creativity, but the idea behind it was to find out the origins of a word. Escape seems to have developed in the 13th century from the word scape or scapen. It meant much the same as what we know it as now, but I’d never spotted the similarities between landscape, seascape or desertscape. Adventure often finds its way in there too, with the ‘cape’ part of the word coming from the Latin word escappare meaning to flee with only one’s cape. Then there is the word escapade, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as ‘an act involving some danger, risk, or excitement, because it differs from usual or expected behaviour.’

That appealed to me enormously, so I changed the title of this post from creating musical escapes and adventures to creating musical escapades. Excitement, daring, adventure…and most importantly, the deviation from the norm. As you know, I love wackiness and weirdness…

Musical Escapades into the unknown…maybe. Embarking on musical escapades…better.

In case you’re wondering, I’m searching for words to help me find some direction for posting on social media. As many tell me, it’s a necessary evil, but I don’t want to feel negative towards it. Dreaming up musical escapades is often what makes me want to practice, teach and create. It makes me feel energised and inspired, and so I thought my strange imaginings would be a fun and positive thing to share. They are silly and bizarre, but that’s the way I’d like to roll. It’s so easy to get bogged down with technique and discipline, perfectionism, or building habits and to-do lists, but what is it all for? What about the story we are trying to tell? 

The importance of being precise, perfect and prescriptive is quickly diminishing with the abundance of AI models, so perhaps now is when we need to champion our individuality? To send our imaginations on a quest into the unknown to come back with something that’s unique and unusual, something we can connect to… 

Connection? No, that’s not the right word either. It’s certainly along those lines and similar to a choose your own adventure story. 

My memory of Choose books led me down a rabbit hole of research where I came across the article in The New Yorker, which says the books were devised by Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery, and inspired by their daughters. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-allure-of-choose-your-own-adventure-books#

One of the well-known titles includes this book here…which of course I had to read, but they ended up with around sixty titles, all after being rejected by the big publishing houses. 

Packard’s daughter Andrea ‘can still remember looking at her father’s diagrams for the books: the forking branches spidering across taped-together paper charts. To her, “those charts felt like houses of possibility.” A fork means a choice; a straight line, and the story continues. A black dot signals the end, an arrow allows you to circle back, and if you’re lucky, you find yourself at a positive ending asterisk.

The author of the article, Leslie Jamison, says you start out following your intuition, but soon ‘It was like wearing brave-person drag. You let yourself rummage through the rest of the book to find every single ending, the same way you’d rummage through a bag of chips (if your nutritionist mother let you eat chips) to find every single shard.’

It reminded me of a show we used to love as children. I’ve just spent way too long searching for it, but I think it was called T-Bag Strikes Again, where the character T-shirt becomes trapped inside a storybook and somehow prevents the story from ending. I really can’t remember much about it, and it would be fascinating to watch now all these years later…

But why am I going down this rabbit hole? Well, along with helping us to think outside the box and imagine creative possibilities; Choose books are also said to empower ourselves and others, allowing us to embody the story and also experience joy.

Choose your own musical escapade? Musical escapades for the adventurous, or young at heart? Musical escapades of possibility?

Escape into musical possibility…That’s getting closer. We spend so much time limiting ourselves, telling ourselves things are a waste of time, not important or not good enough. What could we achieve if we just dove headfirst into adventure? What if we took the road less travelled or turned the page we’ve never read before? Imagine what new worlds await and what stories we could tell…

One other great thing about escaping into our music is that I find it helps with nerves. If I take my mind to where I imagine the composer was when they wrote the music, it’s easier to become immersed in the experience and communicate that story to the audience. 

So, like the Choose books, I believe the notes are just the beginning of the story. Every time we play them, we can go in any direction. We can let our brains become bombarded with instructions which may sometimes be useful, but all of that control becomes oppressive after a while. Although it’s hard, we need to break free, set that voice in our head aside, and allow ourselves to experience the magic that is music making. An imperfect, chaotic and unexpected adventure. 

Of course, we need reason. Without it, we’d be constantly winding up at full stops, but what if ignoring it leads to an asterisk? That’s what I would love to encourage you all to do. Let’s take a risk! I’ll be leaping too and just imagine where escaping into possibility might lead us?

#creativity #castleofcreativity #musicalescapades #writingformiddlegrade #middlegradebooks #choosebooks #chooseyourownadventure #escapewithreading