A Whole New World and The Same Old Me (but a little older)

The longer you live, the more you see. The more you experience, the more you value the things that haven't changed too much.

Musically (and outside of my own musical changes) I have seen worlds around me accept and reject trends. Serialism, or what my father used to call "Mickey Mouse music," made its way into the highest eschelons of musical performance, even though the musicians at the top of the "classical" musical profession had a really difficult time putting their hearts and souls into it.

Fortunately most people in the listening audience couldn't tell whether the sounds those musicians were making were happening at the proper times. If a skilled professional has a hard time hearing complicated cross rhythms, your average music-savvy listener isn't going to know whether playing correctly or not. Same with intervals that exist between the "cracks" of the keyboard. I have not yet met a musician who could accurately divide a whole step into "slices" smaller (or slightly larger) than a quarter tone. And quarter tones need to be tuned by ear to match the guesses of the other people in an ensemble playing or singing them in order to get that brownish quarter-tone color that some of us recognize as correct.

Please challenge me on this point. I have asked before, and have never gotten a response.

After a long time of listening and playing, I can hear quarter tones, but if I try to sing them it is always a random guess as to where the pitch should go--never a measurement.

I have witnessed technical playing levels in young people (people in their twenties) escalate. I have heard tremendous improvements in wind-player intonation, thanks, in part, to excellent teaching and instruments that are far better than the ones I grew up with.

The musical world I grew up in was dominated by men. Most of the music that I heard in orchestral concerts was written by men. Nearly all orchestral concerts were conducted by men. A female brass player was an anomaly. Female wind players were treated differently from their male colleagues.

Orchestral jobs were hard to get, but somehow, when audition procedures for non-major orchestras became fair, the best players for the job often turned out to be female. This happened in orchestras in major cities, and it happened in orchestras in smaller cities. (The ugly truth behind salary discrepancies between men and women principal wind players in major orchestras didn't come to light until a few years ago.)

We all know that women have been writing music for a very long time, and we all know that music written by women appears on a relative handful of programs of orchestral music. A great many dedicated people tried to change this a few years ago. A few succeeded for a time, but I'm not seeing any kind of practice really stick in the world (Midwestern United States) around me. I have written a lot on the subject of composers who are women here. You can read a bunch of posts here, if you are interested.

But I keep on keeping on, because I trust that the world around me will keep changing. Clearly social media and the bottom-feeding gleaning and regurgitating device that calls itself intelligence will never give me an accurate report on whether people play the music I write or not, but I will just keep on doing what I do, because it is what I do.

Recognition means very little to me. I am wired not to believe it when someone says something good about me or what I have written. I do, however, know when something I do is something of quality, and it pleases me greatly when someone recognizes that quality and uses it to further their expressive musical experience.

And I know when I am playing in tune, counting correctly, and when I am communicating with my musical colleagues in a meaningful way.