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How'd you start listening to that? (a bloggy thread.)

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ruyi:
I would title this "your relationship with music" cos I feel like that's more broad and captures more of what I want to get at, but that also seems kinda general and vague on its own so maybe less people would click on the thread? v :mrgreen: v (jesus since when has he been called mr. green)

I was just reading threads in here for the first time in a while and I was thinking, you guys have really interesting things to say about music! But then I also feel like I don't have much to contribute to your discussions, since I don't really listen to a lot of the things that you guys listen to and thus don't have any relevant examples to make claims from.

(Though I was just reading the board theory thread, and it reminded me of how my reaction to certain bands was picked up from certain posters I respect. It's really odd! I mean, it's kinda less the case these days, but it was funny how reading this forum at an age where I started getting serious about listening to music really informed my evaluation of contemporary genres, even though I didn't end up, well, liking the things that I developed respect for.)

Anyways, I'm interested in stories about your relationship with music, especially when you were growing up. I said "listening" cos it seems that that's what discussion here will center on most often but of course I'd also love to hear about how you came to play an instrument, compose or mix things on your computer, and so on.

I hope to come back and write more about my experiences with different kinds of music, but here's my post in the meantime. I have given it a boring topic-title for your convenience :mrgreen: but don't feel obliged to do the same.


Playing classical piano:

I started playing piano when I was three, so from a very young age, I spent time trying to learn and do what was expected of me by a teacher, and I believed that this of kind of practicing determined whether my music was "good" or not. The experience got me listening to classical music, so I always remember having at least a hazy familiarity with the big-name composers, the four time periods, and what not.* I also got familiar with a repertory of standard piano works for beginners, since they generally came up again and again at the recitals for all my teacher's students.

Listening to recordings didn't really figure in for me here. How "good" we played ultimately hinged on how well we performed, which depended on--but was not guaranteed by!--how hard we practiced. I always found this frustrating, cos it seemed that something like visual art didn't have this problem, where you could work really hard but then choke up on a day of reckoning and thus have nothing to show for it. (I should say, though, that this isn't really how I think about things now.)

For the most part, this was all happening within a closed community of a bunch of families who all knew each other. With a teacher that I had when I was younger (like age 3-8), this was pretty nice, and felt kind of like a big extended family, especially since a lot of them might be Chinese or Christian like my mom. But with a teacher I had after moving to a different city (8-16), it did feel pretty tense and pressured, even though a lot of the families attended the same (Chinese Christian) church. The new teacher was stricter, but perhaps it was also the age when crying about this sort of thing was more likely to happen. Or actually I might have just been bad at making friends, I dunno, I mean other kids might have had more fun than me. Wait yeah now I think they probably did.

I do remember this teacher was very...orthodox. She'd often express disapproval at the idea of "just playing the notes," as in, doing things kinda however you liked, without thinking about traditional expectations and attention to detail. She would describe this kind of playing as "sloppy," or like a "street entertainer." I never got to talk to her about this, but when I think about this now, this attitude really bothers me, the belief that one shouldn't play in this way, or that entertainment is, you know, mere entertainment, and thus bad. It also felt like she was implying that my playing in contexts like church or for friends was somehow less important or less legitimate than my playing in recitals/competitions. Of course, now I feel that it's the reverse--the former contexts are really the only things that matter for sure, while the latter only matters if you intend to pursue classical performance vocationally. Anyways, it's one of those things where I didn't explicitly adopt her beliefs, but it took work for me to bring these assumptions that I had absorbed to mind so that I could actively disagree with them, if that makes sense.

All of this playing involved my mom a lot, since she'd always push me to practice regularly (though of course, as I grew up, it becomes trickier to keep saying that she pushed me) and she'd evaluate my recitals as well. On the one hand, it was nice that she cared about me so much in this routine, even mundane way. (Actually I guess a lot of things about 'a parent's love' are routine/mundane.) On the other hand, this meant that my musical performance could affect our relationship pretty powerfully. If I didn't practice very much and performed poorly, the consequence wasn't just that my music was "bad"--it also made her upset, and she would complain that I didn't value her time/financial investment in my lessons, or even that I didn't care about her.

(This dynamic is probably familiar to a lot of you--I mean, there is a stereotype for it. I'm only bothering to spell it out because I feel like it still affects my experience when I listen to recordings / attend performances of this kind of music.)

I've never really had the feeling that music could "belong" to me, even when it was my body that was doing it. Instead, it felt kinda like I was trying to get at intimacy with works of music. I think a lot of this comes from the idea that classical works are just kinda there and as a performer you just have to, you know, interpret or approximate it as best you can. There's also the fact that we were studying piano; I think most other commonly-studied instruments require you to play with other people and other kinds of instruments on the regular. So with classical piano, music could feel somewhat isolating. Actually, perhaps not isolating, but it did entail very sharply delineated roles. I mean, listening was still in tandem with a group of other people, but for the most part, you worked on your pieces by yourself, and you thought of your performances as solo.

It wasn't until later that I really experienced playing music in a group, and honestly, I still kinda find it hard to wrap my head around, though I have different reasons for different kinds of music.

Shoot, I didn't really get to how I listen to this kind of music these days, but I am really tired. Maybe later.

*Apparently "Western Art Music" or "Common Practice Period" are some new terms floating around in lieu of "classical"? Also I guess the four periods thing is bs too.


potential later topics, so that I remember - church youth group music, top 40 on the radio in middle school and now, dumb things from my daily headphone listening

KvP:
Geez as though I didn't have enough projects to complete this week  8-)

Johnny C:
john that was the least appropriate place to use :coolguy: fyi

KvP:
Shut up I was in a hurry to get to a hardcore show geez

ruyi:

--- Quote from: Johnny C on 20 Feb 2011, 01:08 ---john that was the least appropriate place to use :coolguy: fyi

--- End quote ---

ummmm no put downs in my threads please???? esp wrt emotes...

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