I think the most important realization I came to in the past 12 weeks of this class is that I lead a very sheltered life...musically speaking. I am definitely a Western music junkie, but mostly because I've never really bothered to branch out of the rhythms and styles and even instruments that I am used to. And I had the incredibly narrow-minded belief that most "ethnic" music consisted of tribal chants or "ethnic hog-calling" that could not possibly be of interest to me. But this class proved me wrong. I still like my Western music, but I have come to appreciate and enjoy many other culture's (although, I have to admit, not all...) musics. And while I know our foray into all the different musical types necessarily had to be superficial so that we could at least encounter music of all the genres we did cover, I still feel that I now have a sense of where music from these different areas came from, what it typically sounds like, and how/on what it is played.
As for the most memorable bit from class, I think I would have to say hearing Django Reinhardt play the guitar as amazingly as he did, knowing he had only 2 fingers on one hand, absolutely blew me away. I have a profound respect for anyone who can play an instrument well (virtuosity is awe-inspiring to me, perhaps because I am so far from it myself), but to hear Django play it THAT well despite his handicap...wow.
I'll end with a question that has been on my mind of late: does music come from the land or the people? At first, it seems obvious that the people are who make the music and therefore it comes from them, yet look a little deeper: the original instruments came from the land, and depending on what they are, they inherently produce a different tonal quality than instruments native to other parts of the world. So in the beginning, music was very region-specific, and people were limited in the music they could produce by the materials available to them with which to make the sounds. Moreover, I think much of music originated from trying to mimic sounds we hear in nature everyday, like a bird's song. And the earthly music you hear necessarily depends on where in the world you are (in the desert, you wouldn't be as familiar with the sound of raindrops, while in a city, many don't know what the wind whistling through the trees sounds like). So it just seems to me that nature has given us the gift of music and each culture has taken that gift and molded it in its own way to produce its own variation of music, but the original source was nature, or the land, itself... I don't know, this could all be quite a stretch from the rambling mind of someone who has been up for too long, but it was a random thought that occurred to me that I found intriguing so I thought I would share.