Kurt Baer
PhD Student
Ethnomusicology
Indiana University-Bloomington
To be honest, I am not sure how music has changed my life, as I’ve never really been in a situation where I did not have some sort of music that I was interested in. I can not think of a time when music has not been an important part of my life—I listened to contemporary Christian music all of the time as a kid (it’s what we had at the house) and started playing saxophone as soon as I went into middle school, and haven’t stopped playing, listening to, and studying music since.
One thing that I can say that music has done for me is given me a way of opening my mind toward understanding others and accepting difference. While any aspect of culture could well serve the same purpose, music provided me with some of my most memorable experiences in accepting, understanding, and ultimately appreciating cultural difference. Time and time again, new types of music have challenged my preexisting aesthetics and worldviews. From when I just happened to download a Cannonball Adderley track as a middle school student, starting my headfirst dive into jazz all the way to my first exposure to the likes of Philip Glass, Alban Berg, and John Cage.
As a music student, forcing me to reckon with different aesthetic values and systems to my first forays into “world” music that taught me how unnatural and arbitrary the ideas about music I had been studying in music school actually were. Music has served as a tool for opening my mind and attuning myself toward ways of being other than my own. Each experience of listening to something that sounds ”weird,” upon closer inspection, has provided me a means of glimpsing different modes of understanding and ways of being that are just complex, just as important, and just as arbitrary as my own. Perhaps a bit like taking the red pill and finding out you are in the Matrix, this exercise of learning how to understand different types of music can help up new and different ways of seeing the world. While it is admittedly one way of looking at these issues among many, listening to, playing, and studying music has served me as one of the primary ways that I have been able to investigate my own aesthetic and cultural assumptions and make the move toward at least trying to understand and appreciate things that operate in different systems and under different assumptions.
As a music student, forcing me to reckon with different aesthetic values and systems to my first forays into “world” music that taught me how unnatural and arbitrary the ideas about music I had been studying in music school actually were. Music has served as a tool for opening my mind and attuning myself toward ways of being other than my own. Each experience of listening to something that sounds ”weird,” upon closer inspection, has provided me a means of glimpsing different modes of understanding and ways of being that are just complex, just as important, and just as arbitrary as my own. Perhaps a bit like taking the red pill and finding out you are in the Matrix, this exercise of learning how to understand different types of music can help up new and different ways of seeing the world. While it is admittedly one way of looking at these issues among many, listening to, playing, and studying music has served me as one of the primary ways that I have been able to investigate my own aesthetic and cultural assumptions and make the move toward at least trying to understand and appreciate things that operate in different systems and under different assumptions.
Gaining this type of understanding—an ability to appreciate, and perhaps even understand and embrace, other value systems than the ones that we are most comfortable with— is in my opinion, incredibly important. History is filled with instances where cultural difference has been taken for cultural inequality because people are not willing to understand it for what it is and instead judge it based upon the qualities of some other system. Music has provided me a space in which to begin figure these issues out. In learning to understand the aesthetic system behind Balinese gamelan music, aestheticizing silence and appreciating random chance in the music of John Cage, perceiving the nuances of the development in a Beethoven sonata, and appreciating the artistry in Snoop Dogg’s flow, I have better been able to understand the presence of many different cultural and aesthetic systems, which in turn has allowed me to investigate my own personal tastes and cultural assumptions and recognize them as such. This process of understanding —or learning to understand—myself and others has been immensely rewarding to me, opening me up to new experiences and shaping and enriching my life in important ways.
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