Poster's Perspective: Music According to Adam Sullivan

Hello everyone and welcome to the conclusion of this week of celebration! Today marks the 2 year anniversary of ASMTB, and for a lot of people that seems like something that doesn't really need to have a week's worth of spam invested into such a small piece of trivia. To me this means a lot in several different ways from statistically, personally and of course musically. So without further ado, let us start looking into my perspectives on music and then wrap this two part post up with why this celebration even happened.

First off, music means a lot to me. As you have seen over the past music has meant various this to others such as Family, Community, Life, Exploration, Expression and Growth among many other things to the five people who graciously wrote for this series (especially Anu whom I literally asked her the day of to write hers for me). These are very bold and very positive things that were written and I'm extremely grateful to y'all  for writing for me (is my "Southerness" showing through yet?). The reason I decided to start this little mini series was not simply because I was wanting others to "cover me" while I acquired this horrendous cold or "cover me" while I wrote 3 papers for school, one being a mock dissertation for my music history class, (all of which have happened this week, and why this was a day late). The true reason behind this series was to show one thing: Defining what music means to us is too bold of a thing to simply describe with a couple of answers. There is no right answer to what it means to us, as long as it means something, and to musicians that really is something.

In order to begin with what it means to me, we should begin with a little bit of my history. I was born into a musical family. I am among the third generation of musicians in my family line on both my mom and dad's family, though we think it may go back farther. Both of my mom's parents were choir singers, my grandfather being a choir director for several churches in my home town for years. My dad's mother was a pianist for many years at a church in her home town before she met my other grandfather (dad's dad). Even after they married and moved to where they would eventually move to and have my dad and his siblings, she continued played piano. These events led to how my parents became musicians. My dad is a guitarist formed from the era of rock n roll, and my mom a classical pianist. They, too, would become "church musicians", playing in churches and smaller venues to never take it as a professional career. My dad would eventually stop playing in order to pursue a career in engineering, though he does play the guitars we have laying around from time to time. Mom would try to become a music major but then not finish the degree (something about understanding Neapolitan chords) and would become an accountant. 

Another little tid bit of information that may be helpful is to know that I wound up spending a lot of time with all 6 of them when I was younger instead of simply with my mom and dad. This would have me set up to have a large dose of music from my family over anything else, though baseball was a close second. Even now, I spend a lot of time with my grandparents that are still with me.

The point I'm getting at with these stories is because mine covers all of the examples from before. More literally, music represents family and community. Music has always been one of the factors that kept my family connected throughout the generations of variety. Music has always been a playground of exploration which I feel like I have played around with a lot, though there is always so much more to do. It means growth because music has always given me a ground that has allowed me to root onto. Music means expression because this was always the first thing I went to to express anger or sadness. Music means community because the site you are reading this on was built from vocalizing my thoughts on music. It also means community because that was where I found my few friends that I have. Finally music means life because I honestly wouldn't have done anything else.

There are, two things that music means most to me but you will need to subscribe in order to find out what they were. I am seriously sorry that this article was extended so far behind, but between some family issues and being completely bed ridden by bronchitis, I simply could not produce a post that was remotely comprehensive.  

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