What am I doing here?

“Music is a whole oasis in my head. The creation process is so personal and fulfilling.”
— River Phoenix

I guess that I want to write about music. Or maybe it would be better to say that I want to write about my relationship with music. I am not in any way professionally involved in music these days, though I did work at music stores for a number of years in the 1980s and 1990s—variously as sales clerk, singles buyer, shipping and receiving clerk and product manager/buyer. Those days will probably crop up here from time to time, but they will not be the focus. What I want to make the space to explore here is all aspects of my lifelong fascination with music.

 

There were two main impetuses which have led to the creation of this blog. I was reading Confessions of ignorance, one of the blogs maintained by my friend Seana (who I worked with not at a music store, but at a book store), and I wondered, “how does one leave a comment on this blogspot thing?”. I glanced at the top of the page, looking for a “Create Account” link, and instead found a “Create Blog” link. “Huh...” thought I.

 

The other impetus came from a book that I was reading. A book which is about neither music nor blogs, but rather is about—well the title itself says it most thoroughly: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing by Marie Kondo. I bought the Kindle version on a whim. I was not consciously feeling that I needed to tidy, but the book has inspired me to do so. The other thing that it inspired me to do (explicitly—this is an oddly wide-ranging book) was to look at what has been most important to me throughout my life.

 

When I pondered this question it became very clear to me that, apart from my family, the thing that I have always treasured and made a part of my life in some way is music. Here are some of the memories that came up:

 

- One of the earliest toys that I can remember having was a “record player”, which was actually a sort of music box. The records were plastic disks with raised nubs which plucked tuned metal strips in the cartridge at the end of the tone arm.

- The only specific memory that I retain of pre-school involves the class sitting on the floor around a piano being played by the teacher, singing a song about a frog on a log.

- The best part of going to Shakey's Pizza when I was a child was not the pizza itself, but was rather the fact that there was a live band. (Or was it just a duo? I definitely remember piano and banjo.) Best of all, I could go up and play the washboard with them. “Shave and a haircut, two bits!”

And the music-related memories come more fast and furious as I move closer to the present in my recollections. Some of those will probably end up here. But memories aside, there can be no doubt that at the current time I am in a period of increased fascination with music. In recent years I have purchased (and sometimes I even play) several musical instruments. I listen to music nearly every waking hour, and as I fall asleep. I am, for the first time that I can recall, reading a biography of a composer (I seldom read biographies at all).

So here I will put down some of my thoughts on music. Will they interest anyone else? That I cannot say, but I look forward to seeing where this takes me.