Day 14: Thank you for the music

[mousme]

curtana has asked me to write about the music I love. If I had infinite amounts of time, I would never get to the end of this subject, and tonight I only have about an hour in which to write this post, get dressed and run to work. Alas.

Working 911 here has been exhausting (in a good way), because not only is it quite busy but I also have to learn everything anew, since each comm centre works differently. So instead of waking up at 14:30 or even 15:30, I've been sleeping until 16:00 or even 16:30 every day (I also finish later in the morning, which means a bit less sleep than usual), and today I had a half-hour phone call with my parents, which resulted in my having even less time than usual for writing.

So, music.

I think the best way to broach this topic will be to think of as many of the musical genres I enjoy (spoiler: there are a lot), and try to talk a little bit about each one. I will probably forget a bunch, but we'll just have to take that risk.

Classical

I would be remiss if I didn't start with this. I've always felt that "classical" is a bit of a misnomer, because it encompasses so many centuries of very different-sounding music. No one I've met who truly loves classical music will ever refer to it only as that in conversation, preferring to break it down into its component parts (Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic, etc.). The only time I really hear it classified as such is in phrases like "I don't like classical music," "Classical music is so boring," and "I hate classical music." As if one could encompass hundreds of years of musical evolution under the same umbrella.

My own love of classical music stems from, you guessed it, my parents. I don't know how old I was when I first became aware of what I was listening to, but I have very early memories of listening to the vinyl records that my father would put on when we were all sitting in the living room. There was always music in our house, either a record or just CBC Radio or Radio Canada playing in the background. Our house was never, ever quiet. When I was very little my parents used to play stories on tape for me (and we had a few on vinyl as well), and those always had an accompanying score that was plucked from the classical repertoire. I remember listening to the story of Beauty and the Beast, whose opening chords were plucked directly from the Peer Gynt suite by Edvard Grieg, and so that piece to this day holds a place of nostalgic importance in my heart.

My favourite composer is probably Antonin Dvorak. I can't write his name properly as I can't figure out those particular accents on my keyboard. *sigh* I first heard his American Quartet when I was twelve years old, and my parents and I had travelled to France for the second time in my life. They bought tickets to the Tbilissi Quartet, who were playing in a local church, and they played Dvorak and also String Quartet no. 2 by Borodin. I don't know if it was just the acoustics in the church, or if there was something magical in the air that day, but it was the most beautiful music I'd ever heard, and since then I don't think I've ever let much time go by without listening to one or the other piece of music.

My loyalty in classical music tends to lie with the Romantics, but that isn't to say I haven't greatly enjoyed other periods of music too. I am particularly fond of recorder pieces from the Baroque period, possibly because when I was a child I played the recorder until I was 13 years old, and not just because my school forced me to. While I will never be a professional musician, I have a pretty good ear for music, and I started with that instrument when I was four years old and enjoyed it tremendously. Of course, I was also quite possibly the most easily frustrated child ever, and so when I didn't get pieces perfectly on the first try I found it incredibly disheartening. I was a perfectionist from an early age, I guess, and the idea of having to practise for hours or days or months to get a piece "right" was particularly abhorrent. I'm more patient these days, but that's not saying much. ;)

Rock and Roll and Pop Rock and That Music I Always Associated With Rock But Probably Isn't

I probably shouldn't lump these into the same category, but whatever, it's my LJ.

When I was three years old, my parents had me listen to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I never looked back.

I have been an avid fan of all things Beatles ever since. I think the appeal of that first album I listened to was the sound of the "live" audience as the band tunes up at the beginning. It was a sound with which I was already pretty familiar, even if my concert-going days were all ahead of me at that point. I don't know why I loved the noise of the band tuning its instruments and the murmur of voices appealed to me as much as it did, even then, but it never failed to send a little thrill up my spine.

From the Beatles I moved on to Simon & Garfunkel and Cat Stevens, and then to Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez all of whom were my parents' favourites. I know that most of these count maybe as a little more "folk" than rock per se, but they're all mixed up together in my head because I listened to all of them in the same time frame.

My parents were not really into classic rock (it came after their time), but my mother did adore The Doors and Jefferson Airplane, and so I inherited her love for those bands. When I was in my teens friends introduced me to Dire Straights and ABBA, and boy was that a discovery! My poor parents were subjected to ABBA on loop for quite a while, though I think my mother ended up enjoying the music a lot more than my father did.

Last but not least, I have Supernatural to thank for my proper discovery of classic rock. I knew some of the music, of course, but I'd become a little stuck in my listening habits

Auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes

This is another legacy from my parents. From a very early age my father introduced me to the great French singers and songwriters. Léo Ferré, Jacques Brel, and all their contemporaries. Ferré was my father's favourite, and he made a huge mistake when I was, oh, about two years old, and put on the record of Léo Ferré chante Verlaine, notably the first song "Écoutez la chanson bien douce."

All you parents out there listening to "Let It Go" on loop right now will feel my father's pain, because I refused to listen to anything else for probably months. It's the first song in this video:

Over the years as my own taste developed I found I had more of a predilection for Jacques Brel, who has more of a romantic bent to his lyrics, whereas Ferré tended toward sarcasm and cynicism. Brel wasn't particularly syrupy but he believed in love, which is probably why his songs resonated with me so much. There's almost always a tinge of sadness in his music, a hint of nostalgia even while so much of his music is infused with hope.

I can't leave this section here without mentioning my teenaged musical crush on Boris Vian, whose scathing condemnation of the military-industrial complex appealed to my newly found sense of justice and equity and so forth. :) I not only listened to all of his music, but I read all of his novels, which were surreal to the point of being virtual nonsense, but oh, did I love it all. His songs were light, they were fun, but they were nonetheless biting commentaries on society at large. And some of them broke my heart, too.

Musicals

My poor parents. When I was 14 I discovered The Phantom of the Opera. It's my father's fault. He'd already taken me when I was 11 to see Les Misérables, and then insisted that, if English people were going to insist on making musicals out of classic French books, then I should at least read the books.

So I did, and while I never did go back to see Les Misérables in English (he took me to see it in French, of course), I fell in love with The Phantom of the Opera. I fell hard, too, the way one can only fall when one is 14 years old and faced with a tragic love story. (Okay, looking back, the Phantom is actually a horrible murderer and had already killed lots of people long before Christine came along, and adult me knows that being with him would have been a terrible idea, but at the time I had bought 100% into the myth that men could be "saved" or redeemed by the love of a good woman.)

So after the loop of ABBA and Dire Straights, it was The Phantom of the Opera for the better part of a year. My parents don't even like musicals, whereas they at least enjoyed my other musical choices. Poor things. :)

One musical they both clearly enjoyed was My Fair Lady, which is a household favourite to this day. My parents and I have had this game since I was very small, which basically boils down to "who can remember this poem/passage/song" the best? Someone starts a quote, someone else finishes it, or we all finish it together. Usually the quote is contextual, so if we were outside and it had started raining, my father would turn to me and say, "C'était un temps déraisonnable..." and that was my cue to finish the stanza:

"... On avait mis les morts à table,
On faisait des châteaux de sable,
On prenait les loups pour des chiens.
Tout se passait de pôle en épaule,
La pièce était-elle ou-non drôle..."

And then we'd finish together: "C'était de n'y comprendre rien!"

And then we'd giggle madly. Yes, we are a family of dorks. :)

So My Fair Lady was part of that game, specifically the song You Did It, the part where they start talking about Eliza's introduction at the ball, with Zoltan Karparthy. My parents are especially fond of the phrase "That dreadful Hungarian!" Don't get me wrong, it's a horribly offensive song, but for whatever reason it just stuck with us, and so we have fun with it. Actually, the whole musical is pretty terrible, but there you go.

Country Music

Speaking of things my parents don't like, country music falls squarely into that category. I've always liked the particular sound of country, be it the familiar twang of guitar and voice, or the more modern versions that carry over to popular radio these days.

My own fondness for country comes from the fact that I really, really like to dance to it. I spent several years learning to line dance and to two-step and even to swing dance a bit to it, specifically East Coast Swing.

Dancing is the one thing I miss the most these days. My schedule just doesn't allow for a regular weeknight activity like that, so I've been reduced to only listening to all my favourite songs in the car and wishing I was able to get back into a line with 30 or 40 other people and let the world melt away.

I don't have any favourite artists per se, when it comes to Country Western. I was introduced to a wide variety of artists at the same time, and never settled on one that I liked. Basically my criteria for whether I like the music boils down to "Can I dance to it?" If I can, the odds are good I will enjoy it. Also, the tackier it sounds, the more I seem to like it. XD

Exhibit A:

On that note (see what I did there?), I shall have to leave you. I have run out of writing time today, which means that the entry on Brideshead Revisited will have to wait until tomorrow. Sorry, folks!

Comments

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

"I've always felt that "classical" is a bit of a misnomer, because it encompasses so many centuries of very different-sounding music. [...] As if one could encompass hundreds of years of musical evolution under the same umbrella."

YES, THIS. Pet peeve.

Also... Borodin's string quartet no. 2. Dreamy sigh.

I have fond memories of us choosing our music for writing jams, especially the day we threw Dvorak quartets and Shostakovich in the player.

[blackmare.livejournal.com]

Something for you in the "cheesy country you can dance to" category. Junior Brown's My Wife Thinks You're Dead (this is not a song about cheating, in case it matters). I love this one a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaEzT5MusFs&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[guruwench.livejournal.com]

This piece is one I have loved for many years; I bought it on cassette when I was maybe 20, not for this piece, but for the 1812 on the flip side. I ended up loving this piece and rarely listening to the reverse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsGRglp6tvs&feature=kp