musical autobiography

I was introduced to music at a very early age due to the fact that I was an extremely colique-y baby. My mom bought a tape of soothing classical music to play so that I could fall asleep, and amazingly it worked. Growing up, my mom was constantly playing Raffi tapes for my sister and me which were basically sing along shows she used to distract us so that we'd leave her alone--she knew we liked them too. Then, in elementary school, like every other kid in the district, I had music class a couple of days per week where we'd bang on little xylophones, shake maracas, and "play" recorders, but the first non-traditional music I was introduced to was la cucaracha in Spanish class starting in kindergarten. We also learned the mexican hat dance. Also, in elementary school we would occasionally have visitors from other cultures come for assemblies, but the only one I remember was a flamenco group who came to the school to dance and who brought live musicians with them. I thought the finger castanets were neat and I wanted a pair.

It wasn't until 7th grade that I started playing non-classical music. In home-room everyday the kids would play intramural sports, but because I was a music nerd, I got out of it so that I could go to the morning string class where we played fiddle music. The guy teaching us was part Irish and had a good amount of fiddle experience, so we were working with a pretty knowledgable source. From that point until college, I didn't really have much exposure to music other than what my mom listened to on the radio and what I played on my violin. So my musical world consisted mostly of contemporary Christian music and classical violin/orchestra music. The one encounter I had with foreign music during that stretch of 4 years was when a friend introduced me to "Pink Martini," a band from Oregon or something who performs a lot of music from foreign film. They sing in about 16 different languages including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Portugese, French, English, Croatian, Arabic, and Russian--check them out!

As a freshman in college, I started to realize that the classical music standards, though masterpieces, were not what interested me the most. We've all heard them, and it's nice to hear them again, but I became drawn to twentieth century music and music of other cultures--they present messages which most people may not have heard yet! Looking through the CD filing cabinets at random I found Bulgarian village songs--unlike anything I've ever heard before. My guitar-friend turned me on to South-American guitar music, and a borrowed iPod introduced me to indian ragas, which I'm now addicted to. I fell in love with the drones and tried to wrap my mind around the rhythmic syllables, but they're built on a concept which most westerners have a difficult time understanding without fairly extensive practice and research. So I bought a tabla and started watching some youtube videos on how to play it. It's much more complex than you'd think, with over 14 different distinguished contact points on a single drum.

Last year I had an itch to play a non-western piece, so I found Turkish solo violin music online somewhere and printed it out. It was built on a scale system unlike anything I've ever played. Not only did it incorporate 1/4 tones, but also 1/8th tones, and I didn't even know how to read the thing! Luckily it came with instructions.

Then this past summer during a trip to Sonoma, I was lucky enough to be surprised with tickets to see the Kronos Quartet perform all middle-eastern music. They played a few traditional pieces adapted for string quartet and drum, but one contemporary piece written for them was particularly odd. The cellist played an 8 stringed cello-ish thing which he had to stand up to play--all pizz--and another instrument invented for the piece was a neckless stringed instrument designed for droning. It was just a body mounted horizontally on a stand with 4 strings and two bridges. Two strings were strung from one side crossing one bridge while the other two were strung from the opposite side, criss-crossing in the middle. It required two people to be played, standing opposite one another while they bowed, careful not to hit the string the other was bowing as it would stop the vibrations. This instrument was wacky, but inventive. After this concert, I downloaded a lot of middle eastern music and started studying it aurally like I had the indian music. Then, this year when Nawar came, hanging out with him introduced me to egyptian music--not just traditional stuff, but pop-music as well. The instrumentation and design is interesting to think about as we're so used to our own pop-music with synthasizers and fairly simple harmonies.

I don't have an extensive history with world music, but I like to listen to as much of it as possible because I think it's important to venture outside of the familiar. Creativity can't exist among commonalities.