I think one of the reasons why I’ve delayed so long in integrating my music world with my blogging (or literary writing) world can be found in that, as a child, I just wanted to be just like everyone else. Unfortunately, by the time I was a pre-adolescent and on my way to a lifelong hobby as a composer (could still be a career, but I have other more pressing priorities at this stage of my life), I was asking for books about sports as presents, rather than books on music or other composers. I was a much bigger Michael Jordan fan than I was of Ludwig van Beethoven. (Just in case you thought it was impossible to put those two men in the same sentence, here we are.)
In the days leading up to my eighth-grade graduation, I
remember my headmaster making a comment in his description of the book he was
going to present to me. [Spoiler: about a week or so earlier, he took all the
eighth graders out to either Barnes and Noble or Borders, so that we could pick
out our own books that he would end up presenting to us at some kind of event. I
forget if it was an all-school event, or it if was a private luncheon with our
parents there.] He commented that, due to how musical I was, even compared to peers
that all were extremely musical in their own rights, he was expecting to present
to me a book about J.S. Bach, or Beethoven, or someone of the like. He was
telling the story in a jovial manner, of course. The book I ended up with, I
believe, was titled: “It Ain’t Over Till The Fat Lady Sings,” and it had
absolutely nothing to do with singing or with music. It was a book on
last-second, game-winning shots or plays.
I still wrote music, but I found that I preferred to hang
out with non-musical types. And that’s pretty much what I did. I really didn’t
make close friends with anyone who was super-musical until I myself decided to
go into music for a full-time career in my mid-to-late twenties. (One exception: I did have a close friend who double-majored in music and philosophy, but the bulk of our friendship wasn't about music at all, but rather hanging out and talking about life.)
I still like my sports. As you can see, even in this current
era of blogging, I will occasionally post sport-themed blog posts. There’s
something normalizing about following sports, although I will admit that how
I follow has changed. But something else has changed, too: before I realized I
needed to change my career again (away from music and to something else), I
started to discover a hidden passion for music history, especially as I began
researching different composers and songwriters on Wikipedia.
The story of my interest in music history began, rather
inadvertently, in college. In a previous post I briefly touched on my
experience with my primary composition instructor (who was also my advisor). He
gave me some valuable intellectual tools to consider for composing, but the
mark his own compositional prowess left on me was simply for me to not ever
compose like him. (“Do what he says; don’t do as he does.”) But the
other important part of my compositional experience in college is that the
major itself wasn’t all that well developed, certainly not in comparison with
other majors in the music department. (Of course, I didn’t find any of this out
until at least halfway through my time in school!)
The short version was that they didn’t put together enough
higher-level classes that directly related to the major, especially for a
Bachelor of Music, as opposed to a Bachelor of Arts for the same major. As a result,
I ended up taking three upper-level Music History courses, on par with getting a
major in Musicology. One of the profs had developed notoriety in regard to the
difficulty of her classes, papers, tests, even smaller bibliography projects,
in that all students referred to them behind her back using her first name. (Typically,
this was a big “no-no” when addressing college professors! I’m sure that’s all
changed now.) Naturally, I selected her for all my upper-level Music History
courses. For all the challenges that her classes posed, it was thanks to her
that I learned how to write a proper paper.
The one class that I took with her that I got into (I forget
the title now) focused on the question: “what does this music connote?” We
still of course had to learn and memorize the title, composer, date (get it within
5 years), nationality, and style characteristics, and then name it all
correctly based on the snippet that was played on quizzes and exams. But that extra
question, “what does this music connote?” really opened the door for me to
really get interested in learning the music. I believe that was the first time
I got higher than a “C” in her classes. (I think I got a “B.”) That was a
victory. I had one more class with her after that, and I believe I ended up
with a “B” in that course as well. Unfortunately, she has since passed on, but to
this day I still remember with gratitude the breakthroughs I was able to have in
her courses, and also in a couple key areas of the intellectual area of my
life. Later, at my first job after college, one of my bosses commented that I
wrote well. That was nice to hear. As a child, writing essays and papers were a
tall task for me. Today, I still have an interest in music history, primarily
thanks to this one professor I had.
But it took time. In college, my three best friends majored
in biology, economics, and Classics (Latin). The woman I had the biggest crush
on, also in college, majored in math, and another woman I had just as big a
crush on, a few years after college, went on to get her PhD in chemical
engineering. I couldn’t tell you why for the life of me I had (virtually) zero
interest in connecting with other musicians, whether for friendship, career
networking, or romantic possibilities. I think I just wanted to be “normal,”
because I knew I wasn’t. Also, I was unable to, even as a young adult,
differentiate between “I’m not normal” due to being a creative musician, vs. “I’m
not normal” due to all the unresolved pain I was carrying and stuffing and
trying like heck to pretend wasn’t there. Thankfully, I can now. But back then,
I suspect I stuffed my musical aspirations and curiosities for the same reason.
(“Maybe if I wasn’t a musician, my life wouldn’t suck.”) Thankfully, I
didn’t go far enough to find out if that was indeed true.
After about three years of different people asking, and
after a job I thought I might’ve held on to for a while relocated without me, I
finally became willing to teach piano lessons. I resisted it for as long as I
did, because I had known for a long time that that didn’t pay the bills. But,
with a mentor at my church giving me some tips and pointers, I opened my
practice in my late-twenties and taught for six years. Around the same time, I accepted
an invitation to gig with two different bands, and I got to learn about
performing with other people in a non-choir setting. It also allowed me to
learn a whole bunch of music that I had never heard of let alone performed. And
then with an invitation to join a pilot program for group music sessions in
nursing homes, I was able to expand my repertoire much further. After a few
years’ experience, I was able to, for the first time, see how much grew,
developed, and changed, across multiple different genres. I already knew about “Classical”
– I was schooled in that. But now I was learning about jazz, the Great American
songbook, musicals, funk, classic rock, and blues, and how things changed and
developed over time. A musical production on the life of Buddy Holly that my
aunt took me to once gave me for the first time, understanding for how
rock-and-roll came to be, and how, in a lot of ways, rock too had its own “Baroque”
era. The sense I got from it was that, in both eras, instruments and ensembles
were being explored, experimented, and honed until the perfect balance was found.
I was able to absorb a lot in those years that fed further into what interested
me regarding music, not just for my own compositional perspective, but also for
finding a potential niche.
Of course, it helped that almost all my colleagues were not
only musicians, but women my age that were musicians. I learned to become
open and interested in a gal that was artistic. Heck, my love writes music,
herself! (She’s a lot more modest about her work than I am about it, but she’s
got some pretty good stuff in there.)
I’m deliberately using up a few posts here to give backstory
to the music part of my life. I’m not sure if I still have a few background
pieces yet to share, or if I’ve finally exhausted it. I also still don’t know
what I want to do with this blogging space. I don’t really want to show
pictures or scans of composition fragments, especially if they’re not
copyrighted. I also don’t want to, just like in my mission statement from rebooting
the blog, start going down a slippery slope of talking about music to venting
about myself. But I would like to share something akin to “liner notes” about
different compositions or songs that are either being written, or reworked, or ready
for release on my bandcamp page. If nothing else, I’d like to save the musicologists
time when it comes to musical analysis from a historical perspective.
While my career still must take a different turn, I still
hope to compose at as many different stages of life as possible, and to have a decent
output of works that is at least respectable, by the time I hit the end. Maybe
someday I’ll even have a concert where they’re all performed. Maybe someday I’ll
even write a book about different things related to what interests me in music.
Time will tell.