Sing Me Your Song

Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good.

John Zorn
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I love music. It is probably the most important thing in my life. My love of music goes back to my childhood. No one in my house listened to music although my sister was a singer and a reasonably good pianist. But there was no music in the home except for an $11 plastic AM radio, which was my constant companion.

I wanted to become a musician. I bought books on musical composition, some of which I still have, Someone gave me a violin and I tried to learn how to play it. I studied voice and piano. But I finally had to admit that I had no talent for music. So I became an actor instead.

Years later I found that I might have made a fairly good clarinetist when I had the occasion to play one. Some day I may buy a clarinet if I can, and find out.

One of the most amazing things I've discovered over the years is that there is music in everything. Trees and buildings sing their songs and we can hear them if we only listen. A flower has a silent song which we can hear with our minds if we listen.

Music has been called the universal language. On a basic level that means a violinist from Japan and a pianist from Sweden who don't speak each other's languages can share a profound life experience by playing a Mozart violin and piano sonata together. Nationality and cultural differences don't get in the way.

But there's more to it. All music, even the most modernly dissonant is speaking directly to the human sensitivity, the human heart and mind. Thus any human being on earth can appreciate and respond to it. Experience and taste dictate what one is likely to listen to but it is all available, silent or otherwise, to the human consciousness.

There can be no doubt about there being music in outer space and one day it will be recorded and heard if it hasn't been already by some curious scientist.

Music is melody, harmony and rhythm, the cranium, rib cage and pelvis, the thought, feeling and action, the root, stem and blossom of life.

One day a coworker heard me singing a Donovan song and, knowing I was an expert in classical music, wondered why I knew it. I said that I knew all kinds of songs, because I listen to all kinds of music. A music lover will. I love classical music. I also love jazz, blues, rock, country, blue grass, salsa, folk from all over the world. While some of the snobs around me were turning up their noses at Liberace, Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo, I was hearing them and finding something good in all of it.

A melody will make the emotions sing, the intricacies of harmonic progressions will fascinate the mind and rhythm will energize the spirit. Music is the language of life. It's the one true metalanguage. I love music.

DB - The Vagabond
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AUTUMN QUESTION

(This is not a contest.)

At what event of the past do you wish you could be present? Why?

Only 8 responses so far.

dbdacoba@aol.com

Thank you.
DB
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