Copyright © 1991 by Nick Dallett
nickdal (at) speakeasy.net
Revised April 1996

     Ten years ago, I graduated high school and began teaching guitar to help pay the rent. I immediately noticed a common thread in my students: all had learned music as children, but had given it up because the rigid methods and attitudes of their teachers took the soul out of the music. The reasons they wanted to learn music were not being addressed.

     Soon afterwards, I left Los Angeles and moved to the Pacific Northwest. I had met enough people in the record industry to convince me that the commercial market was not the direction in music I wanted to take. From the safety of a small town 1200 miles distant, I watched my friends throw themselves against a wall, trying to break through in a business that had little to do with creativity and everything to do with exploitation and conformity.

     I began to work in different ways with my music students, taking them on walks, or having them listen to the sounds around them, letting them improvise or make up instruments. I found that these things helped them to enjoy music and see it in different ways, helped them to understand not just what they were doing, but why.

     In trying to find new ways to excite my students, I found myself getting drawn farther and farther afield, into metaphysics, psychology, physical therapy, and religion. I learned how to bring my experience as a massage therapist and my knowledge of Jungian psychology to bear on the subject of music. At the same time, my musical interests strayed from the mainstream moving more and more towards the primitive music of other cultures, and the few examples in our culture of true creativity and personal expression. The result is the book you hold in your hands.

     This book is aimed at adult music students of all levels, and is meant to help integrate the many conflicting methods styles and world-views that buffet the poor musician-in-training from all sides: the power-hungry money-machine of the contemporary record industry, the blissed-out empowerment of the new - age movement, the rigid rules and methods of the classical tradition, and the anything-goes chaos of the post-hippie hippies. In it I have tried to balance the text with exercises that will allow you to explore music in a non-analytical way, to find out what the musical experience is to you.

     perhaps more than any other of my creative output, this book reflects the influence of my parents - insights into the human psyche from my mother, and my father's love of music and facility for interdisciplinary study and experimentation.

     Credit is also due to members of writer's group, including Robert Reeves, Carolyn Latteier, David Mathieson, Janet Dallett, Ru Kirk, and, Alex Fowler, who saw and critiqued the manuscript in its early stages.

-Nick Dallett
September 1991
Port Townsend, WA.

NOTE: The Internet Edition of The Musical Experience is here for reference purposes only. You are free to read and enjoy the text, and to download portions for your own education. Teachers interested in using this text as a basis for school curriculum or individual instruction may obtain a license to download this text or a looseleaf hardcopy by contacting Acoustic Confusion Music at nickdal@speakeasy.net.