We Shall Not Be Moved

I was going to post a picture for Wordless Wednesday, but I got waylaid by Julie’s Hump Day Hmm topic – music: What does it mean for you, in your life? Do you simply listen? Are you a singer? A musician? Were you one? The picture can wait. The earworm in my head is trying to crawl out.

My musical upbringing was idiosyncratic, completely.

I grew up with show tunes and folk singers on the stereo – Hair, Joni Mitchell, A Chorus Line, Tom Paxton, Candide, Odetta. I grew up with a favorite recording of Britten’s "Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra" – a rare recording without narration, because who needs narration when the music tells you what’s happening?

By high school, I was hanging out with a geek crowd. Other than classical music, the only two songs I remember listening to in high school were “Stairway to Heaven” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”. Pretty lame, huh? Don’t bother with the math – I graduated from high school in 1978.

I ended up as a music major in college – and therefore listened to and played mostly classical music. And I went to a lot of concerts. The aberration was Bruce Springsteen – I spent many an evening listening to Bruce while drinking Mount Gay rum & Tab and playing Boggle.

The fall after I graduated from college, I spent four months in London, working but alone. I still had my student ID, and I used it to go out to concerts, operas, ballets 5 or 6 nights a week. And while in graduate school, I went out a lot – to concerts, operas, ballets, and the occasional night club.

But gradually, slowly, I’ve very nearly given up attending live performances of classical music. I’d simply rather not be in a concert hall. Because, it’s boring. And that saddens me. Because if I can’t bear it – me – who used to play the flute and who majored in music in college and who actually knows some stuff about what's going on – where the hell is the audience going to come from? I don’t even listen to all that much classical music anymore – because too often I’m in the car or on the train and I just don’t have the attention span that a 25 minute symphony requires, not to mention the fact that many of my CDs never got unpacked when we moved more than three years ago.

I’d much rather listen to stuff on my iPod – I’m addicted to shuffle. I put the thing on random and enjoy the felicitous (or not) juxtapositions of Bob Dylan against Stephin Merritt, Wilco followed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Emmylou Harris after Brian Wilson, Billie Holiday next to the Talking Heads, Morphine before Jeff Buckley. Or sometimes I listen to all the versions of "Hallelujah" in a row (I've got five). And I add stuff – I rummage around on the web or in iTunes, I follow through on suggestions, I hear what co-workers are playing through their computers in the office, I buy the new Springsteen record. I own one Fiona Apple song because I heard it on Jonathan Schwartz’s weekend radio show – and it’s divine, though nothing else of hers grabs me. I even downloaded a free song that I got because I bought a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And that’s today’s earworm: Mavis Staples singing We Shall Not Be Moved. It’s a great song, a protest song, and she does it with power and subtlety. It’s so good that I think I need to buy the whole record.

Julie - you pushed a couple of buttons. I think I have at least two more posts related to this one, if not more. Because I didn't talk about playing music. I didn't talk about singing. I didn't talk about the future, I didn't talk about the joys of modern technology. So, stay tuned.