Journal Week Eight

Musicovery.com is a very fun website, I must say. I enjoyed exploring it this week. I really like the websites Professor Simon has shared with us that use software to suggest music. It’s a much more interactive and attractive option than Amazon.com’s suggestions. I don’t buy much from iTunes, so I’m not sure what that experience is like. Of course, I still prefer a friend telling me that I’ll like certain music because they know how many times I’ve listened to a Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ album on repeat.

The reading on improvisation was fairly captivating for me. When I first began playing music, I would make up songs and play a lot, but as I got older, I thought I couldn’t improvise. Part of this was because most of my playing experience was on the violin, in a classical manner. My grandfather played country fiddle, but that was very different than what I did, at least that was what I was taught. It was very intimidating to be put into a situation with much older musicians in my family and being expecting to come up with something to play. I would usually just pick a drone note - I still do this when I’m improving and I’m stuck.

In Part Five, section MIC- the Instrument, Bailey talks about how people learn how to play an instrument. I think much of the ‘natural’ process of learning how to play an instrument the author and the musicians’ he quotes is stopped. Some of it is seen as abusing the instrument, or simply not the ‘right’ way to play an instrument. I agree that instruments should be treated with care and respect, but I do not think this means that musicians can’t experiment with coaxing new sounds of an instrument in a non-conventional manner. How else will innovations happen?

I object to Bailey’s describing ethnic instruments as having, “very limited capability and that very little instrumental skill is needed to play” (p.101). I had a hard time telling if this was his assessment or if he was only trying to convey what the anti-instrumentalists felt about ethnic instruments. First, I think it reveals an ugly prejudice against non-Western musics. Many people only think that Western music is complicated or capable of being considered virtuosic. This is simply not true. Two examples of non-Western virtuosic instruments spring to my mind: the West African kora and the Indian sitar. Both have long, long histories of music and musicians. Each are at least as old as the violin, and much older than the guitar, which I think of two of the most obvious examples of virtuosic instruments in Western music, the other being the piano. Also, I think it’s dangerous to make blanket statements about all music that is not Western music. Can you really say anything very intelligent about a group of musics that includes Tuvan throat singing, reggae and Native American drumming? Most likely, you will make a generalization that will border on offensive and slip into the assumption that all non-Western cultures are primitive.

I enjoyed seeing Alain Danielou’s name pop up in the book. I suspect it might be in the section on Indian music more, too. I did a little bit of research into Danielou as an undergraduate when I was researching tuning modes in Indian music. The research I did contradicted some of Danielou’s assertions in terms of the srutis in Indian music having very exact measurements. My research was probably not nearly as broad as it could have been, so I would be interested to revisit the topic and see if my earlier findings hold up.