The prototype for the following document was graphic designer Bruce Mau's “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” from his book Life Style. While our music listening manifesto is a new document designed to challenge and excite music listeners everywhere, points 1, 7, 18, 21, 24, and 27 were paraphrased with appreciation from Mau’s source. Other sources of inspiration: music, our personal experiences, and the incredible beauty that surrounds us.
Music listening: an incomplete manifesto
by Greg Anderson & Elizabeth Joy Roe
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Allow music to transform you. The prerequisites for transformation: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
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Embrace the new. It takes courage to depart from familiarity and escape your comfort zone: only with change is there life.
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Make every encounter new. Every listening adventure – no matter how seemingly familiar or repetitive – is new. All musical occasions are an opportunity for transformation, growth, and discovery.
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The musical experience is yours. You live it. You create it. Your engagement is a vital ingredient.
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If you are bored, see points 1, 2, 3, and 4.
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Woah. The music doesn’t always happen where we think it ought to. Instead, it happens somewhere else – in the silence, in the reverb on the walls, in the performer’s gasp for air. Music comes charged with a palpable energy created by its surroundings at that very moment. Under any other circumstance, it would be different.
