I have no idea how to approach this thing, so here goes.
In this class, I have learned:
-How many different kinds of music there are throughout the world, and how I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been introduced to half of them if I hadn’t enrolled in this class.
-That what I consider to be music differs a lot from what others consider to be music.
-What Klezmer music is, and that it can either be really insightful into an immigrant’s experience or that it can talk about getting stoned.
-That Robert Johnson might have sold his soul to the devil.
-That I wish that I had been at the Monterrey Pop Festival to check out Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.
-That Ravi Shankar influenced the Beatles/George Harrison more than I had thought.
-That I can’t understand Japanese music as Japanese people do, because I don’t hear music with the left/right side of my brain.
-That video invariably provides me with a better appreciation of a musician’s art, and maybe better understanding how the hell he/she did that.
-That Gypsy culture is really fascinating, and how foolish I was for failing to realize this after reading 100 Years of Solitude.
-That I can’t dance, and perhaps that prohibits me a little bit from really appreciating how dynamic and fun dancing can be.
-That I am utterly inept in any technology, but especially those pertaining to music.
-That I wish I had an IPod- graduation is around the corner though, so the timing of this realization is perfect.
-That I can now present a Powerpoint presentation with music/dialogue (my own or others), and that I can put this presentation on a webpage so that others can see/hear it.
-That flamenco is one of the most beautiful forms of music I’ve heard.
-That Wickipedia (sp?) could be the wave of the future.
-That I still haven’t been caught up in this blog thing yet- will it ever happen? That remains to be seen.
-That music might be a whole lot more mathematical than I had previously thought (this might be obvious for some people, but how does one relate this to innovation/improvisation? The correlation between the two fascinates me, and yet I can’t understand the genius behind it).
-That no matter what anyone says, I don’t like stuff from Bollywood- it depresses me.
-That while I appreciate Irish music, I’m not all that attracted to it.
-That “Apple saved the music biz”
-That Mash-ups could be one of the coolest innovations in music today (and that according to copyright law, this might be music’s biggest contradiction)
-That musicians such as Django completely blow my mind- how can he do that with two fingers, while I struggle with my five? Incredible.
-That instruments can be more than the things you buy in music stores- and that a lot of times, incredible sounds come out of commonplace objects.
-That I really want to travel to Africa one day, to hear the music there while experiencing a culture completely different, on all sorts of levels, from my own.
-That a thing called the “Dialectizer” exists.
-That while I was often fascinated by the subject, I found that I could rarely follow up the things we had seen in class with explorations of my own- thank you senior thesis.
-That Hugh has one of the coolest musical rooms I’ve ever seen.
-That I want to learn to play the sitar like Ravi Shankar (good luck).
-That I hope American/Western culture doesn’t drown out the originality of other cultures, as I think it currently is.
-That I hope to continue to expand my musical horizons-I am particularly guilty of restricting my preferences to all things Western.
So what does it all mean? I can’t begin to explain the things that I’ve learned, as what I say now will probably change in about twenty minutes. There have been too many questions that have arisen in this journey to articulate now, and plenty of them remain unanswered. But I would say that the biggest thing that I’ve learned along the way is that more kinds of music exist out there than I had previously thought, which attests to the variety of different cultures/values that exist throughout the world. So where does this music come from? I think that I’ve learned that much of it is a product of the culture which different peoples inhabit, which invariably means that there are plenty of things that I am missing out on when listening to music from India, Japan, or Bangladesh (although I don’t think different sides of my brain have anything to do with it). I’ve also come to better appreciate how incredibly brilliant human beings are in their search for originality, creativity, and innovativeness- how could a person listen to Robert Johnson, Django, or Ravi Shankar and deny this? I guess the bottom line is that my ear is now a little more open (like Peter’s) than it previously was. I hope that after leaving this class, my enthusiasm for music of other cultures will continue (although I still plan on listening to plenty of Dylan- now better appreciating the impact that Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell had on his songwriting- and plenty of rap after this project of mine) with that new IPod of mine- was this a whole lot of rambling? Do I contradict myself? To paraphrase Mr. Walt Whitman, fine, I happily contradict myself.