Music Post 1: Broad Musical Concepts

Let me start by explaining some things about my relationship to music. First, when I was a little kid, I slept 3 hours, and talked and was ornery for 23 hours. My parents would inevitably get exhausted, and when I was old enough to put records on the turntable, my Mom would have finally had enough and sit me down in front of the cut-rate Fisher stereo with my Mom's Beatles records and the remainder of my Dad's record collection. Sometimes my Mom would forget I was in front of the stereo, and I would be sitting there - probably age 9 or 10 - for six or more hours before she realized where I was.

I love music, and I always did. Music is sacred to me. Music is part of my personal religion. It is also a language to me, one that I'm still working out the alphabet and vocabulary to, and finally, as with most things, I experience music intensely visually. Music sparks me to see visions, and I am, for better or worse, a very visionary type of human being.

A further thing is, that if you name a genre of music, there is probably some form of music from that genre that I have listened to and enjoyed. For example, I like polka. I lived until about 5 in Milwaukee, and there are a ton of ethnic Poles and Germans there, and if you went to a party in Milwaukee, you would wind up hearing ethnic Polish or German polka music. Polka isn't that easy to play, and yeah, it's pretty lame sounding, and it's old trad-stuff, but polka music is very upbeat and very enjoyable when the music is well-played. Also, dancing the polka correctly is very difficult, and in Milwaukee a small group of people would know how to do so, and that was incredible fun to watch.

Take a very discordant example. There are a few death metal bands I enjoy. I liked Ministry's Industrial Metal attack on right-wing Christianity from 1991, "Psalm 69," and still occasionally hit the N.W.O., or the Just One Fix. A few years back, all the kiddies on the 'Net were raving about Slipknot, and I grabbed some things off of Gnutella, and I really like the Slipknot track, "Duality," which strikes me as Christian Death metal. The song is about terminal anguish, and seems to me to be a prayer to God to "get me out of this mess." I think everything else I've ever heard by Slipknot is total trash, but I love that particular track.

I'm not going to list all of the examples, but to my ear, there is no "bad music," simply because of genre, even pop music, when it is in its proper place. You don't go to the Opera House to hear a "phat 808," and I better not hear one when I'm at the Opera House or I'm going to vie for a ticket refund Also, you don't go to the dance house to hear the opera "Carmen," and you wouldn't get a whole lot of dancing done if they performed "Carmen," at the dance house.

Even when we consider music that is almost entirely programmed, in its proper place, that can be amazing, given some programmers that have used some ingenuity. Nothing beats hearing a proper performer play an instrument or sing well, but you can do things with programming that a performer can't, and in its proper place, programmed music can be totally amazing. Music is so inexhaustible, and when it is in its proper place, and some effort has been put into making the music, there isn't any music that is utterly without value.

I had studied music and been kind of ho-hum about studying it until about 17. My buddies and I used to play chess after school, and I was in the High School library - of all places - and picked out Bernstein's "Infinite Variety of Music," because it sat next to the chess books. The book was taken from Bernstein's early 60's television show that showcased classical music and some jazz in order to try to broaden the audience for classical music. That particular series dealt with how for every musical cliche, there were millions of ways of transforming that cliche into new music.

Bernstein was a very weak, sick man, but he supported not only classical music, but contemporary music and jazz. He despised dodecaphonic and serial music, but did premiere some of that music in his day as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He could also conduct the hell out of Mahler, although otherwise his conducting was no more than mediocre.

There were these piano reductions of the music being showcased in the book, and I probably still couldn't play any of them today, so at the time I went and bought cheap recordings of the music showcased in the book. I also tried some of the jazz mentioned. To be honest, I was forcing myself through the recordings and stifling a yawn and my frustration the whole way through.

However, for some crazy reason I formed a desire at this point in my life, one I'm still working on achieving today, and that was, "I want to compose new music in the classical tradition, for instruments used in the classical repertoire." Why would a 17-year-old be so insane, when he wasn't even enjoying the music he was trying out? You have got me, but that was where it all started. I was 17-years-old and I had no idea how much trouble that simple intent was going to cause me.

I don't want to hit a ton of music theory on the blog, and the big reason is that the best way to learn theory is to look at sheet music, and I really have no way of showing you sheet music examples on the blog. If I was running a pro-blog, I would get a coder to work something out for me with Adobe Acrobat and insert pdf clips, but I don't have the money at this point. Still, we will hit some theory, and I'm going to try to remember to keep it simple.

One of the problems about having a great deal of knowledge is that you forget that most of your audience doesn't have the context for the knowledge you are trying to teach, so we'll try not to pile a great big mountain of theory on here. However, even though most people won't do music as a career, almost anybody would like to be able to play a little guitar for their girlfriend, or maybe go "get the led out," once a month playing a hard rock show. I think I can help in that area, and I would like to help in that area.

The other thing to remember is that first, the people who work in the media industry who are ethical are amazingly talented, from top to bottom, and second, that the term "media industry," is usually synonymous with the term, "organized crime." In other words, your guitar playing for your girlfriend may be sweeter than organized crime, and your psycho-rock outfit may be better than the guys getting production value. Keep that in mind and try not to worry too much about the people who are making the bread in media.

I've got three articles planned. One will be on electronic music, one will be on guitar, and one will be on piano. I also want to touch on how to build a good recording library, which will probably be the next piece. Part of learning to play amazing music is listening to music frequently - and again - a man who was totally disorganized at everything has developed some ways of organizing listening to music. So this introduces our basic ideas: Music is one of the most amazing parts of being alive, and any music that is done well is amazing, in its right place. Leave the rest for the listing ship of fools.