Michael’s Musical Musings: Introduction
I’ve been exploring my musical memories recently in an attempt to record important experiences and bring to life facets of my personal journey. From my earliest recollections, both live and recorded music have exerted powerful effects — mainly emotional, internalized, and nonverbal. I have no doubt that this is not unique to me, yet as I look backward and inward I can see how much music has defined who I am, who I’ve become, and what I find important. I see these past experiences as pearls or beads of light — some large, some small — and by gathering them together I'll have a better sense of myself and gain some valuable perspectives and understanding along the way.
Most of my direct experiences with music, especially from earlier periods, are nonverbal. For example, when I was 7 or 8, my family visited neighbors who loved to travel. They had just returned from London where they encountered marching fife and drum corps and purchased a recording. When they played it I was instantly blown away, especially by the power of the drums (I could physically experience the vibrations ) and the melodic fifes were addictive (these neighbors also had the money to afford ‘high-fidelity’ audio equipment). A similar experience occurred when I periodically went to church. While the choir marched in slowly singing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, I was struck in a very visceral way, not necessarily religious, but distinctly emotional.
Music is the most ephemeral of the arts…one can’t see it (except for written music or somehow seeing vibrations), sometimes we can’t start or stop it (eg. riding in an elevator), it affects different parts of our make-up (including memory), it is subjective, it is communicative both verbally and nonverbally, it can occur in Nature, it could be epically large like the philosophical concept of ‘The Music of the Spheres’ or it could be just a simple ring of a bell. So it means lots of different things to lots of different people. Some archeologists and scholars believe that early man’s caves were not only for shelter but doubled as a place where sound could vibrate and be amplified naturally. We’re now living in an age of recorded music that is still a neophyte phenomenon (Edison invented the phonograph in 1877). We’ve gone from listening to sound primitively recorded onto wax or thin metal to our current high-tech digital age of multitracking onto computer hard drives…in zeros and ones!
The scope of music can be overwhelmingly vast, so my endeavor here is to chronicle any clarity and understanding based on my own personal experiences. More entries coming soon....
