Childhood and Music

When I was in my teens, the middle school that I want to had a wonderful program to go in about 4 times a year to see the Boston Symphony Orchesta. While my tastes in music were much more pop oriented at this time, I remember with fondness being exposed to music that may not have been immediately to my liking but that I did appreciate. I also played trombone in both the traditional school band and then again in the jazz band. My trombone has since been donated to a local NJ Catholic school.

My musical tastes have also changed in while they span a wide variety of musical tastes, I often come back to the classics for inspiration. Bach and Mozart and so many others still give me musical inspiration. One might wonder how an experimental musical composer takes inspiration in music that seems so distant from electronic and electro-acoustical music but the truth is that this type of music progressed first from the late 19th and early 20th century romantic music startinig with Wagner and then to those like Stravinsky and Debussy and right into the avant guarde and then those electronic pioneers of music concrete and latter electronic music. Those like Karlheintz Stockhausen whose picture even appears on the Beatle's Sgt. Pepper Album:

http://www.stockhausen.org/beatles_khs.html

5th from the left - top row - guilty of German existential brooding as always - may he rest in peace.

Even before the likes of Bach, music goes back all the way to early plainchant at a time when music was advanced by the Catholic Church. In fact, classical music would not have advanced without its support of musicians such as Bach and Mozart.

And for those who think that this type of music is old and tired, try this recent newly appreciate writer of plainchant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqvoB4uN1Qs

Music has been and will remain part of man's quest for the internal, for God.

That is why I find it tragic that our young people have been deprived of hearing this beautiful music and are almost forced by blind commercialism to listen to a music that in so many ways, they have been enticed to listen to. This of course does not mean that there is not something to be said of rock (although I favor a more progressive or experimental version of it) but why deprive young people of this music? If they hear it and reject what the hear, ok, but lets give them a chance to hear it. John Lennen when he heard his wife playing the Moonlight Sonata was moved to write the song because that appeared on the Beatles Abbey Road. If Yoko was deprived of classical music she would not have inspired her husband.

Groups like "Save the Music" are trying to save music in our public schools so the same education in music that I had in school can be given to our young people today so that they can here more than the latest commercialized trash on their MP3 players:

http://www.vh1savethemusic.com/

Despite the reference to "hiphop" on the front screen of this website, there is more to music than "hiphop"