Friday 15 April 2011

M is for Music


I had lots of thoughts for the letter M including M&Ms those chocolate balls of fun, but decided to go with MUSIC.. After all can you imagine a world without music? Well I guess if you make regular commutes on public transport sitting next to a 'nice' person with headphones that leak THEIR music, you may like the idea of a world without arranged notes and beats?


I have blogged about music before HERE and about live concerts HERE, but this is more about music in general. What is it about music that can divide opinions, as far as different genres go it certainly seems a case of "one man's meat is another man's poison" . I did  a quick Goggle search for styles of music and was AMAZED at how many sub categories of music there are!! Hundreds, to many to list, but if your really keen have a look on Wikipedia's listing of styles.

I love music, of all types, we are very fortunate that both our girls play Piano which means there is often nearly always live music in the house. In fact the eldest Rachel has just passed her Grade6 piano exam and the youngest Ruth is doing well too, with Grade 4 done and dusted.

I do wonder if our decision to like particular music is effected by where we heard it, or the circumstances at the time, we all have songs with sentimental value. I think I'm pretty open minded and often my choice to like or dislike is more to do with lyrics than the composition of notes, hence I have a quite diverse music collection. I guess moods play a part too, what I choose to listen to today will be different tomorrow.
If you really look into things, there are reoccurring sections of music, or what in modern parlance would be termed sampling.  But delve deeper and I guess there are only a limited number of combinations of notes or chords. Not thought about that before ?? Check this out, 4 chords 30 + songs


Perhaps we choose to like a set of songs because at their basic level they are all the same ? Even classical music turns up in a simplified form in many modern songs if you listen closely enough. So having theorised I now have to listen to every track I own and see if they all actually have the same underlying tune, or maybe not, maybe I will just enjoy them for what they are !

Now just before we go I need to clarify that although I am open minded there are still some music and musicians I don't like, for example Justin Bieber, not my thing. I can safely say I'm not a "Belieber" at all. so any fans of the teenage wonder LOOK AWAY NOW !! Parody alert !!!



Till tomorrow ........