Music

If you look at my profile, you'll notice that I have some admittedly unusual tastes in music. Yes, well. . . .

Part of it is natural proclivities, perhaps encouraged by early upbringing: my mother's family was very musical. She, in fact, played piano and guitar and sang in our church choir (when we belonged to a church). I also sang, for a while, both in choir (when we belonged to a church) and as part of a folk duo that never managed to get it together to perform publicly.

I grew up on bluegrass and Elvis. Then my dad brought home a recording of Brahms' terminally great Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor when I was about nine or so. My secret was out: I love music, almost any kind. Jazz throws me a little, because I find it coldly intellectual, but I'm learning. That has, however, forced me to think about why I listen to music. (Well, OK, I just did. It's not like I was holding a gun to my head.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that music may very well antedate our existence as a species. Possibly even a genus. I'm not sure. Where does it stop being signals and start being music? Whales sing. Monkeys howl. Chimps do some sort of rhythmic drumming things with tree branches, and ethologists/anthropologists are still not quite sure what it signifies. (Somehow, "threat display" is just too easy.) (Mmm . . . birds. Can't forget birds. I have thoughts on birdcalls in music, most of which are pretty negative: did I tell you about the recording of Bach's Cantata and Fugue for what sounded like a chorus of panicked sparrows? But, people like Rautavaara and Mars Lasar and Tokeya Inajin have pulled it off.)

I must admit that my normal listening is classical. My radio is permanently set to WFMT, Chicago's one remaining classical station (which, by the way, is available nationally on cable and online.) I mourn the loss of WNIB.

And, as a music reviewer for Epinions, Rambles, and particularly Green Man Review, I've had to learn a lot in the past couple of years. I was on pretty solid ground with the baroque, classical and romantic repertoires, as well as contemporary art music, when I assumed the position of Special Acquisitions (Classical Music) for GMR.

Somehow that wound up including, at least as far as reviews went, Indian classical music as well. I did a lot of research on the raga as a form, so at least there is a glimmer of intelligence in my reviews of that genre (of which, at this point, there are many). I also dipped into gamelan, which I love (except it makes me tense), which brought me to Colin McPhee and then back around to Terry Riley and the whole group of serial minimalists, with whom I had some prior acquaintance. (I used to love seeing Philip Glass in concert, although his early recordings drove me nuts just to listen to.)

Opera took a while, which now strikes me as odd: I love theater, and the performing arts in general, having been an actor and almost a dancer (I did actually perform several times, once with a real professional company). I was a confirmed Wagner freak before I could tolerate Verdi. Puccini formed a nice bridge.

A couple things have happened during all this.

Music has become a context. In that, I'm sure I'm not so different than many of my contemporaries: during the 60s, what we had was our music. That was our defiance and a large part of our identity, and it was a baseline for our lives. (Somewhere along the line, my LPs of Janice Joplin, Eric Clapton, the Stones, Yes, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, Wishbone Ash, all disappeared. I bitterly regret that.)

And the boundaries have disappeared. I listen to "traditional" music from the same place that I listen to Bach or Mozart (and I can't begin to tell you how much I love Mozart). So I find wonderful new experiences in the work of people like Oisin Mac Diarmada and Terry Brennan, and wind up writing about them the same way I write about Tosca or Hildegard von Bingen. And then, with my listening history of American Indian music (which really has to be dealt with as performance art if you're going to understand it at all), I jump into a group like Coyote Oldman or Cusco -- I mean, totally new age -- and see what they've done and where they're going with it, and it becomes really exciting. (And the more I think about it, "traditional" can cover a lot of territory. I mean, it's all based on someone's tradition, right?)

And all this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you care to see what I'm talking about as far as my responses to different kinds of music are concerned, there are links at Hunter's Eye (although be warned -- my music review index for GMR is being updated and some broken links being fixed, which should be done in a couple of days; right now it's a hash).

Damn. Gainful employment is calling, so I have to go. Maybe I'll expand on this later. Maybe you'll leave some comments so I have something to talk about. Maybe.