Music, a love-hate relationship
I'm going at this a bit grudgingly, so I'm using a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down: a.k.a, music.
I have over five days worth of music on my computer, and I am constantly adding more whenever I can, sneaking CDs from my dad's deck, borrowing jazz from my saxophonist friend, and getting whatever classical music I can find.
Nevertheless, it's a love-hate relationship. First, I hate the quizzical looks I get when cite my top-five composers: Chopin, Mahler, Rachmainoff, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. (As a side note they're not even in the spell-checker). Yes, they seem a bit dusty, but they wrote music as well as anyone.
But I love showing these composers to the curious. I don't intend to convert anyone, but it's sheer ignorance to write-off all classical music, especially when classical composers were bad-ass (if I may use the term). Beethoven especially. "What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself," he penned in one acerbic letter. "There are and will be a thousand princes; here is only one Beethoven." Seeing the excited smiles of people hearing Beethoven's Egmont Overture for the first time always thrills me.
I also hate straight musical theory or instrumentation. I used to go to the symphony with some music friends, and they would talk about the motifs of the second movement, the brilliant use of the oboe, and the fascinating chord precipitating the conclusion. What what did you feel? I would ask. Where did it take your heart?
Call me sentimental, but I love the feeling of a piece. I find myself struggling with bone-harrowing loneliness or overgrown smiles, dwarfing my vocabulary day by day. Music takes me where I need to be; it displays what my tongue tumbles over.
That's why I'm not a big fan of Classical classical: it's pure music. The Romantics sought feeling and threaded stories through the dry notation. Mossorsky wrote poems to indicate tempo and feeling for a piece. Chopin ensnared his "wife" with his deep passion for the piano, not with his skills with scales and his knowledge of the the circle of fifths.
All those technical elements come together in the music, but they never define the music to me. One can play notes, but doesn't constitute music.
I guess I could go on, but mostly I just love listening to music. I smuggle new wonders from old favorites and find inspiration everywhere. And I constantly learn more, training my ear with deeper sensitivity.
Music will always be there for me to come staggering home to find.
I have over five days worth of music on my computer, and I am constantly adding more whenever I can, sneaking CDs from my dad's deck, borrowing jazz from my saxophonist friend, and getting whatever classical music I can find.
Nevertheless, it's a love-hate relationship. First, I hate the quizzical looks I get when cite my top-five composers: Chopin, Mahler, Rachmainoff, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. (As a side note they're not even in the spell-checker). Yes, they seem a bit dusty, but they wrote music as well as anyone.
But I love showing these composers to the curious. I don't intend to convert anyone, but it's sheer ignorance to write-off all classical music, especially when classical composers were bad-ass (if I may use the term). Beethoven especially. "What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself," he penned in one acerbic letter. "There are and will be a thousand princes; here is only one Beethoven." Seeing the excited smiles of people hearing Beethoven's Egmont Overture for the first time always thrills me.
I also hate straight musical theory or instrumentation. I used to go to the symphony with some music friends, and they would talk about the motifs of the second movement, the brilliant use of the oboe, and the fascinating chord precipitating the conclusion. What what did you feel? I would ask. Where did it take your heart?
Call me sentimental, but I love the feeling of a piece. I find myself struggling with bone-harrowing loneliness or overgrown smiles, dwarfing my vocabulary day by day. Music takes me where I need to be; it displays what my tongue tumbles over.
That's why I'm not a big fan of Classical classical: it's pure music. The Romantics sought feeling and threaded stories through the dry notation. Mossorsky wrote poems to indicate tempo and feeling for a piece. Chopin ensnared his "wife" with his deep passion for the piano, not with his skills with scales and his knowledge of the the circle of fifths.
All those technical elements come together in the music, but they never define the music to me. One can play notes, but doesn't constitute music.
I guess I could go on, but mostly I just love listening to music. I smuggle new wonders from old favorites and find inspiration everywhere. And I constantly learn more, training my ear with deeper sensitivity.
Music will always be there for me to come staggering home to find.