Poster's Perspective: Music According to Anu Pattabiraman

Dear Music,

I know I don’t do this enough, so I want to take the time to thank you for all the ways in which you enrich my life. To those who don’t know you as well as I do, you may seem like little more than a cryptic pattern of black lines, circles, and squiggles on a page – but I know you are so much more. Here are some of the gifts you have given me over the years:

Persistence: You seemed so hard to tackle, sometimes, but through all the nights you kept me from mastering you unless I slowed down, picked you apart, and practiced you over and over till I spoke the strokes on your pages, you taught me persistence. Whenever I face a challenge, I know now to slow down, pick apart the pieces, and put them back together, with the faith that what I produce will be more beautiful than the ugly challenge it originally was.

Expression: On all those days I was feeling down, the ones on which I felt elated, and the ones where I was melancholy, nostalgic, or pensive, you provided me with a way to express what I couldn’t find the words to say. Regardless of whether there was someone to speak to, I knew there was someone through which my feelings could speak.

Mentors: I needed people to help me explore your depths and innumerable nuances – people who knew you better than I did. The teachers you provided gave me the courage to challenge myself to understand your intricacies, when I would not have had the bravery, energy, or wherewithal to do so on my own. To this day, they remain my closest advisors, whom I can always reach out to for wisdom, courage, or inspiration.

Friends: My closest friends are ones I’ve made through translating your miniscule black strokes into great symphonies and choruses on grand stages. You showed me the bonds that could be forged between people when they listen and respond to each other, when they emote together, and when they each contribute their own small piece to a masterful work of art.

Contribution: You have enabled me to bring joy to countless lives through communicating your beauty to others: to my family, to the sick, to the elderly, to children, and to any who pause their lives to come to a concert and hear something they have not heard before. The gift you have given me to bring meaning into other people’s lives is the one I most cherish.

Growth: Somehow, you continue to surprise me with the infinite forms you can take. From piano, to cello, to voice; from classical, to jazz, to musicals; from world-renowned stages, to weddings, to coffee shops; from my neighbors’ houses, to the local church, to the streets, there seems to be no end to the places where you pop up, and the places where you take me.

I’ve enjoyed our journey so far, Music; so take my hand, and lead me to wherever you choose to take me next. I will gladly follow.

Yours,

Anu Pattabiraman

Alto and Co-Author, Hit Me With Music

Boston, MA

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Kurt Baer

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.

 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.

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Jason Nyguyen

Jason R. Nguyen

Dual-PhD Student

Folklore & Ethnomusicology / Communication & Culture

Indiana University-Bloomington

I come from a family that appreciates music and can even be considered musicians (my mom loves to sing and my dad has been known to pluck out a few tunes on the guitar), as long as one doesn't use the highly professionalizing mentality of music practice in the United States. Of course, they generally bought into this latter mentality, because the ability to perform music (especially classical music) in highly skilled ways suggests in our culture that you are intellectual, cultured, and successful. As a Vietnamese immigrant family, these were important qualities that my parents wanted to confer on their children, so my two sisters and I started learning how to play the violin since about kindergarten. I dutifully played violin throughout primary school and into college: first chair at my high school, first chair in the county, second chair when I got to college. So I've had a successful run as a musician.

But by the end of college, violin had become less important to me. It started to have less relevance in my life. Since I didn't plan on going to a music conservatory, violin and classical music had very little relevance to my social life, and I had already proven my prowess well past the point where greater skill could provide further social capital for someone not planning on a career as a professional violinist. So what was the point? Did I just waste all those years of my life?

Of course not. I wouldn't have traded those experiences for anything. But I think we have to think differently about what music is and what it does to truly understand its value and for me to make my case about the importance of music in my life. We have to understand that our society tends to privilege virtuosity and great skill in music as the reasons for doing it, when those values don't really add up to much of anything in terms of social or financial capital unless you're the absolute best of the best. No, playing violin was at its most valuable to me when it was part of a web of social relationships, when I was participating as part of a group of people trying to achieve an end together: perform an opera, learn a hard piece together, enjoy each other's company, have fun, etc.

Tom Turino refers to "participatory music" in Music as Social Life as being "about the opportunity of connecting in special ways with others and experiencing flow" and "not merely the informal sideline to the 'real' event [...] but rather they are at the center of social life" (2008, pg. 35). This approach to music and its possible value goes against the grain of an individualistic and market-oriented society, but I think it is at the center of finding value in music for anybody but the most elite of musicians. Indeed, my outlook on music in general has shifted entirely from that of my parents. Not simply a tool to teach me discipline or a social practice that confers a certain amount of respectability, music needs to matter in the social relations you make. What ties I still have to my days playing the violin are ties to people: friends I made in the orchestra and wonderful, dedicated teachers. Consequently, when and if I have children someday, I will most certainly urge them to play music, but I will point them towards music and dance that they might enjoy outside of such specific contexts. Perhaps they will learn to play the violin as I did, or maybe they would prefer to beatbox and rap. Maybe one will find greater joy and camaraderie in the school band, while another decides to start a punk rock band.

For me, music doesn't so much change a life as interweaves inextricably with it. It is meaningful when one can't imagine anything before or after it. What was my life before music? There wasn't one.

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Elizabeth Davis

Hello. It's an honor and a pleasure to be asked to submit to this special anniversary week at the blog. For those of you who haven't met me yet, I'm Beth, a cellist and composer living in Columbia, MD, playing in a few of the community orchestras between Baltimore and Washington, DC. When Adam asked if I'd like to write an a article on the theme, celebrating the blog's anniversary and sharing my music experiences, I jumped at the chance.

In a word, music to me means collaboration - from joining a community orchestra when moving to a new town to composition projects that literally span the globe. More about that in a minute.

From my earliest school days in the choir to the orchestra concert I played in last weekend, I have always thrilled to be part of a greater whole. Nothing quite compares to slipping into the gestalt of seventy-odd people converging under the maestro's baton into that perfect moment when it all comes together. Whether it's the ethereal shimmering of a solo woodwind whispering above the muted strings or the enthusiastic, almost tribal rhythm pounding out in the low brass and percussion, being up in the middle of it, playing as a part of the whole, is an experience that you just wont get listening from the audience. And it doesn't just happen overnight. Every practice we have adds to the cohesive connectivity and reinforces musical and friendly bonds.

Music is also a way I can plug in to a new community. I've had to move many times following my spouse to new jobs in new states. And every time we resettle, one of the first things I do is find a local group I can join. I've yet to wind up somewhere that DIDN'T have a community orchestra nearby. Joining gives me an instant community of fellows who also love playing and I'll often end up playing in other chamber groups with members as well. My current string quartet for instance includes the orchestra's 2nd chair first violin and the principal violist who also conducts the ballet where I am now principal cellist. I even work as program assistant for a non-profit that will be playing a concert in Alexandria, VA this summer and Argentina next fall.

I'm currently in the middle of a project that has grown into quite a collaborative effort. It first started when I told one of the dancers where I was playing in the pit that I'd write a ballet for him. It has now grown to not only be slated to be performed by that ballet school and orchestra, but also be recorded by a youth orchestra on the other side of the country with a conductor who works predominantly with Czech ensembles (the conductor was a fellow student at college, he put me in touch with the youth orchestra director). My video editor is a high schooler I met through a fan base for The Piano Guys; my text editor is someone I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with when she was a teenager who now teaches creative writing in Michigan and wrote a poem I am currently setting to music for a tenor who works in Munich, Germany. You can find out more about this project HERE (http://kck.st/OuRmsh)

Finally, as Faith noted Sunday, music is family. These days I get to collaborate with music family members I would have never met without having music so much in my life.

Elizabeth Skola Davis

Poster's Perspective: Music According to Faith

And now, we take a break from our regular programming to bring you a celebration of music...

Yeah, enough with the corniness. But, as Sulli said, the anniversary of the blog is coming up and we wanted to take some time to share what music means to us, and how it's wormed its way into every corner of our lives (whether we planned on that or not!). If you have any stories of what music does for you, feel free to share in the comments or email them--who knows, we may even share them as a post!

Music is a very large part of my life. I could write a dozen books on all the ways music has changed my life and even saved my life, but if I had to boil it down to one word... what does music say to me?

It says family.

My first introduction to music would have been when my mom was pregnant with me, and she would lay on the couch while my dad sat on the floor playing guitar and singing with his back up against her belly. He did this for all of us 7 kids, so we came out pretty much ready to go music-wise.

Of course, like all good kiddies, we took piano lessons (with various amounts of enthusiasm) and since our piano teacher was also a choir director, occasionally we would work up something to sing for church. As a family. When my sister was 5, and I was 12 or so, she became obsessed with the violin. She would put whatever was in her hands at the moment--a building block, a dinner plate, a book--under her chin, and sing, "Under my chin, like a violin!" And because we did everything as a family, we all took up strings. 

Because we were homeschooled, we didn't have a ton of extracurricular activities. We weren't running around to drama club, soccer, softball, chess club--something different for each kid. We made music together, and that was all we needed. Over the years we sang together, played the county fair circuit for a couple of summers as a Celtic group, organized and hosted a youth orchestra, and formed a professional string quartet for weddings and other sundry formal gigs. 

For some people, music means playing the clubs, beer and friends. For others, it means concerto competitions and seat challenges. For me, it means getting done with playing for a black tie banquet and going to Meijer in our tuxes at midnight and riding the penny horse with my brothers. For me, it means getting all giddy when we hear our favorite violin concerto on the radio while riding in the car with my sisters.

And because to me, music means family, if I make enough music with you, you're going to have a special place in my heart. In these last couple years of making music with new friends here in Charlotte, my family has grown more than I would have ever thought possible. I'm getting sappy and I know it, but hey... I think that's the point here. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

A Quick Announcement

Hello everyone! I know I had been promising an announcement for a little while now but apparently there was a glitch and the post that was to be posted Wednesday never went up. I am here to announce that starting Monday, we will be celebrating the 2nd anniversary of ASMTB by having guest writers share their experiences of music. So be warned, there may be a little spam in your inboxes from us, however it is legitimately us. Along with that,the following Friday or Saturday there will be another announcement and a review I've been waiting to complete for a long time. As always, thank you for the continued and growing support! 

Music Theory 101 #3: The Basic Skills of Music; Pitch Pt. 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Music Theory series on here. Before I begin, I would like to say thank you for all the reception and the help that was given towards helping me out with the site! It is not very apparent unless you run a project or a website to realize how much help there is when everyone submits feedback on it. From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely mean thank you. There was some things discussed that will cause a huge shift in this website within the near future, so stay tuned for that!

Key Terms:
Staff
Middle C
Treble Clef (G clef)
Bass Clef (F clef)
Grand Staff

As we were discussing last time, pitch is one of the six basic principles of a language. We have also discussed the basics of pitch as well from it's purpose to how it is heard and even broken it down into the 12 pitches on a keyboard. However, just so we can wrap this discussion up we need to go ahead and head from the basics that every musician knows and talk about the basic skill that every musician should know but do not. This is the staff and reading the clefs.

Blank staff lines from this site

First, we must look at what the staff is. The Music Staff is the space that musicians start when looking at music. It is a set of lines and spaces that musicians use to create notes. There are five (5) lines and four (4) spaces. As you go towards the top of the page, you go higher in pitch or heading towards the bottom of the page the lower you go. The notes themselves vary depending on which clef you are using.

In order to make sure that the following is extremely clear, we must find one point that defines each clef equally. For this, we are going to use "middle C" or the C that is in the middle of the piano. It is usually marked by the logo in the middle of the piano's cover but there are digital keyboards that note where it is. Something else I should bring up now is the statement of octave indicators (or Scientific Pitch Notation). This is how we figure out if a note is higher or lower without saying "this note is higher than" and so on. In the case of the previously stated "Middle C", it is identified as C4. The way I remember that middle C is C4 is thinking "Music starts at C and music is explosive!" (corny, but it works if you need something to use to learn). The way the indicators are meant to work as from C to B. So for example B3 is the B below middle C. For another example, let us look at D5. It is the D an octave above middle C. So instead of being the D directly above middle C, it is a note and an octave up.

This is a treble clef on a staff
Source: It's A Visual Medium

The clef is the first symbol on the staff. It defines where what note is on a staff, much like a a musical GPS coordinator. There are several dozen standardized clefs that are out there, and hundreds of non-standardized but  for this article, we will will talk about two specifically. The first clef we will look at is the Treble Clef, also known as the G clef. The reason for the name is the part that curls around the second to bottom line is noted as G. The space below that is an F, the line below that is E and so on. The space below the G is A, the line above that is B and so on. This G is known as G4 which means it is the G above middle C.

This is a bass clef on a staff
Source: Mr. Scheiber's Music Room

The other clef is the Bass Clef also known as the F clef. As with the previous, the reason for the second name is because the dots are placed around the note F. Also as before if you go down, you have E and D or up leads to G and A. Now, the thing to realize is this F is an F3, or the F below middle C.

This is a grand staff and note equivalents
Source: Click here

The final portion of this post will be about the grand staff and it's uses. The Grand Staff is the combination of the bass and treble clefs. It is used for piano, piano styled instruments and harp reading primarily but is used to condense scores down into an easier to read format. The reasoning is to create a larger range of pitches than any one can accomplish by themselves. It reads as if one large staff. The meet in the middle at middle C. Along with the additional space, there is an additional an bracket at the beginning to link them together. In the case of organ music, there would be three or possibly four staves but as I stated before this is primarily two. Next time we will start heading onto the next topic of discussion!