For many centuries, people have devoted lives to making artificial noises. Laws were worked out to define what was considered pleasing to the ear. Giant elaborate contraptions such as church organs were invented and built with painstaking attention to detail. Why would people do such things?

This is the most important thing.

I believe it should be because music makes you feel something that you involve yourself with it. You should write and practise music guided by your own feelings. If somebody gives you an opinion, it should still be ultimately your decision. In some sense, it might even seem selfish to write music for yourself that satisfies your desires, but you see, if you don't feel something yourself when you work on your music, then how do you know what your audience is supposed to feel? Think about that. Find words to describe it to yourself.

To be professional, it may be necessary to craft a music well, or to perform pieces you might not always like. Ultimately, though, you should be searching for something you yourself feel.

Music is a beautiful and peaceful artform and that is the only way women and children could like it.

If you see it as a scam for groupies, I guarantee then that girls won't like you because their self-preservation instincts are a deep force of nature. In fact, the self-preservation instincts of half the human race have to be counted as one of the most powerful forces of nature on the surface of the globe. You'll see.

If you play a musical instrument, you have to develop a coordination for rhythm and a faculty for hearing the way notes work together in melody and harmony. Part of it is developing your ear and you have to go through some training before you can do it. All the great composers were also performers like Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, even the Beatles otherwise they wouldn't have had such sophisticated ideas and be remembered today.

A music school should not promise people a living out of music. It should pass on the knowledge of theory and history of music, as well as provide an environment for performers and composers to improve and be heard.

One tradition that should be passed on to the next generation is that of the Māori. It is only in recent years that I have heard fragments of the music that this culture used to make. Hundreds of years ago, in valleys of native bush, there would have been heard the voices of the kakapo, the morepork, as well as the haunting sound of the nose flute. As a kid, all I knew about their music came from the boring political ceremonies on television where fat men with diabetes in grass skirts strummed guitars while fat women did a poi dance. I suppose there's also the hip-hop that copies the yanks and glorifies pimping, but somehow there ought to be more to their culture than that.

A musician should only have to make good music. They should be in some way gracious about acknowledging the audience applause, but they should not be required to always be jiggling some part of their body just for the sake of "maximising the entertainment in their act".

I would be happy to have gone to a Roy Orbison concert and if I saw a good pianist at a recital who only focussed his concentration on the music and didn't move his body much at all, there would be no problem. For the music to be good, he would not need to jiggle his feet out to sides when he's not using them or anything.

I believe the purpose of a performance of music should be a feeling that flows. The emphasis on competition in all musical genres shifts this purpose to doing what they think somebody wants them to do, under a lot of stress with incredibly high stakes.

I want to do everything in my power to make music with people in a friendly atmosphere. Hence the following:

I believe many musicians make a pact with a devil. It's when they sign their record contract.

1. If music is turned up too loud, it can damage hearing.
2. If the words advocate something destructive such as the typical throwaway Plastic Money Pop message of "GO TO NIGHTCLUBS AND SCREW! GO TO NIGHTCLUBS AND SCREW! ASSIMILATE! GO TO NIGHTCLUBS AND SCREW!", then that can be part of a larger problem that controls lives and takes happiness away. If the only way you know how to talk to a girl is with pickup lines, you won't be capable of talking to a woman any other way and that includes getting along with a girlfriend or wife.