I loved the Native Americans’ thoughts on music. Their viewing music as being their first means of communication learned directly from their gods was fascinating. I try to think of my music as communicating with God, which is a perfect mirror of their thoughts, and what we give to God is only what he first gave to us, as I hear every week during the offertory.
Our culture is very unusual in that we seem to have a huge gap, like the gap between the rich and the poor, only in a musical sense. What I mean is that there are those who have been so highly trained in music that laypeople feel they cannot even approach art music at all. With the Africans, they sing and even make music as they work, and what they were whistling was a hymn tune. Perhaps no one else has had this experience, but I find if I randomly sing church music wandering around campus that it draws comments and stares. While they are not unfriendly and some people are even complimentary, it makes me feel as if I am doing something terribly unusual, but singing to pass the time or make my day smoother should not be that peculiar. Normal everyday people can sing in choirs, I myself have not had any special training in voice, yet I sing well enough for a choir, and other people in my children’s choir were much better at remembering music from week to week than I because my training in music actually impeded my memory.
I am not sure what inspired me, I often felt so lost. Especially during the blues, other people where recognizing names but I do not believe that I had ever heard any before. I feel as if I opened my ears to listen to different music and examine it without judging it, but I am not especially interested in hearing any more. I must say that one of today’s handouts inspires me to want to make baklava when I go home, maybe I will also look up types of eucalyptus; the leaves depicted in the Australia presentation looked nothing like the eucalyptus tree that was next to my house growing up. I know there are different cultivars, ours was one that a koala bear would snub, but I would think that the leaves would at least look similar, but those were a different color and shape.
3 comments:
I randomly sing church music all over campus too! We should wander together and sing the same song and draw a bigger crowd!
I am glad that you have now had experience with other music besides classical music. I used to avoid pop music like the plague but then my roomie introduced me to popular music that had great melodies and harmonies and texts that had a message and that meant something and I began to like it more and more. I'm not saying you have to like popular music... I'm just saying I'm glad that you were able to be exposed to it so it won't be so horrendous to you. Or if it is you can tell whoever you are with that you have already been introduced to it and they won't have to introduce it to you again. (You don't really have to pay attention to anything I said if you don't want to).
Anyway... I loved your little bit of ADD-ness at the end with the leaves. I love koalas.
Have a great evening!
Go learn Orb so we can sing that!
I think the most important thing that I learned is just to listen, because freinds have tried to get me to listen to pop music before and I wasn't listening the right way. That doesn't make any sense, I need to go to bed, that was partly my thing with the leaves. I think my times with this are messed up.
Sometimes I also feel like my musical traning is a hindrance. I think it is mostly that I was trained to "read" music, not to remember it, not to sing it, etc. I had a teacher who encouraged me to sing my organ pieces, but I never got very far with that. I guess there's always time to learn new habits.
People who don't make music or sing seem to take it on as part of their identity (and vice versa). I often hear "I'm not a singer" or "you wouldn't want me in the choir." Why is it that in our culture you need formal training to be musical, or simple to sing a song? This is ridiculous!
I was intimidated by classmates who know so much and seem so excited about other cultures. I respect them for their knowledge and enthusiasm, but I wonder why I've never developed a keen interest in non-western music. Thankfully, that's changing. I am intersted in learning more and listening more, but I don't know if I'll ever be a world music buff.
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