Robert P. Taylor's Musicians: Reflections of Music Making

Events and associated unplanned encounters
as life-defining

Plans of all sorts are necessary for defining one's life, and humans make many such plans, and attempt to follow them, with varying degrees of exactness, throughout their lives. Professionals, for example, often make such plans, the details of which typically cover some sort of educational and degree path, stages along the career path, perhaps stages along a family or partnership path, and so on. And professional lives routinely incorporates planning for, and actually participating in, a myriad of formal events related to the overall life plans, events like graduations, promotions, professional conferences, weddings, and so on. However, though following such planned paths and and participating in such associated events certainly has a life-defining impact on the individual, they do not completely define his or her life by any means. Every life is also very much defined by spontaneous or partially spontaneous encounters with others along the way, encounters before during and after such meetings and events, and even encounters unrelated to any of them. In fact, one reason elaborate plans for life are never exactly fulfilled is because of just such unplanned encounters. They continually engage the individual's life in ways not forseen in any plan, altering it's definition in unanticipated ways. It is the formal events, true, but it is also with the unplanned, spontaneous encounters associated with the planned events that inspires this site. It reflects musicians as they rehearse for, wait, and actually perform a range of music in scheduled musical events, since It is in this mixture of activity that musicians experience many of the unplanned encounters which help to define their lives.

Typical records of the life-defining events, records such as programs, group photographs, audio and video recordings or streaming video, reviews in news media, and so on all tend to focus on the formal events themselves, and omit the unplanned encounters that may be just as life-defining. For that reasons, this website and a number of predecessors (see Other, analogous Taylor webberies link below) deliberately uses digitized versions of rapid sketches done on-the-spot before, during, and after the official events to preserve something of the unplanned encounters that may be of equal importance. More about the use of such images appears in Sketches as Records of human activity below, more about a relevant special advantage of using digital images appears in Simultaneous concurrent exhibition of digital images, and more about such use in Musicians particularly in Simultaneous concurrent exhibition in Musicians .

Sketches as Records of Encounters    Simultaneous concurrent exhibition of digital images

Simultaneous concurrent exhibition in Musicians    Other, analogous Taylor webberies

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