Thursday 30 September 2004

Pic of the day: If you can imagine the kind of music that goes with this kind of picture, you know my current tastes. (This is from the ending sequence for each episode of the anime Pita Ten, and yes I have bought the official soundtrack CD, air mailed from japan. ^_^)

My musical tastes

I don't consider myself a person to whom music is important. I may be wrong about this, because I tend to be humming or whistling a tune at almost any time of the day. It used to be only at home, I think. But these days I do it at work as well, and lately I have found myself humming in the supermarket. I wonder how far it will go before the men in white come to take me away. And I wonder what I will be singing at that time...

I have never confined myself to one genre. I like melodic music, but rhythm is not very important to me. I want the music to be energetic in other ways, though. Music that rises and falls in just the right pattern can really carry me away. I believe that the waves of the music interacts with the waves in our brains, the larger and deeper waves that influence our mood and our perceived energy level. Strangely, the only other place I have seen this theory is in the fiction book The Black Cloud by the astronomer Hoyle. Certainly there must be other people who have the same theory or competing ones. But I don't usually read about music. I don't usually talk about music. And I don't usually set aside time for music. I consume it on the go or while doing other things, and sometimes in preparation for writing.

***

When I was a small boy, I grew up in a family where there wasn't much singing and playing instruments. My father could play some, but did not often take the time when I can remember. I believe he used to play more before, when my older brothers were small. And he would sing while working, much like I do at his age, not very artistically but simply for his own pleasure; or perhaps because of his own pleasure or happiness, the way I do? I never asked him, and I am not sure it matters anymore. Apart from this, I grew up with "canned" music. We had radio and a gramophone, and my brothers got a tape recorder and a cassette recorder while I was still rather small. (We didn't have the refrigerator until after I left home at 15, so perhaps music wasn't entirely unimportant to us after all...) I would listen to whatever music my brothers had captured, but of course I had my favorites. Some of the songs were in English, and I had no idea what they meant. I did not learn English until a bit into gradeschool, second or fourth grade, I am not quite sure.

My oldest brother listened to the Beatles before they became classic, back when they were still considered hairy rebels. I inherited some of his records -- he didn't die, but he did go away. Then again, so did I when I reached the same age. By then I was thoroughly familiar with many of the songs by the Beatles and their contemporaries.

But I also listened to Norwegian and Swedish pop songs, and even traditional music such as fiddle and Hardanger fiddle. I even... okay, I guess I should warn you. This may be disgusting, so please prepare yourself so you don't make retching noises in public. I even enjoyed country music. Of course, I actually lived in the countryside, a day's travel from the nearest city or even town. And I lived on the west coast of Norway, so I guess Western music was completely natural for us. Yes, I listened to lots and lots of Country & Western, and liked it. Of course, I was much younger than. I had barely started my conscious life. I did not know the connection between western music, alcohol and depression.

***

At the age of 15 I moved away from home to go to high school. By then I had already met "Smith's Friends", the small congregation of pious mystics that originated here in Norway. They have their own songs with spiritual contents, but like several Christian movements at the time they had adopted the melodies from popular worldly songs of previous generations. The melodies were generally simple and upbeat, although there were few sad songs too. The typical songs were not all that different from the most upbeat country songs, and the most common instrument by far was the guitar. For the next few years, these songs were the main menu of my music. I learned to play the organ and the accordion to some extent, although I was never good at them because I have always lacked a sense of rhythm. I also have some kind of brain damage that makes me unable to correlate to the music I hear to the music I perform, including song. Neither the rhythm nor the tone. I seem to have inherited the worst of both of my parents in this regard, while my oldest brother got the best parts. He's been playing in bands at least part-time since he was a teen and probably still does.

Anyway, during most of my teen years and early adulthood these Christian songs had the main place in my musical mind, and it is not uncommon that I still sing them. But then again, I guess I am still a Christian of sorts, albeit an heretic even among heretics these days. Anyway, I also picked up some of the popular melodies at the time; I did not live in a monastery, after all. And I began my trend of confusing love songs with Christian hymns. I found them to be similar both in melody and content, and I still think so.

During my adult life, I have slowly added more songs to my favorites. For the most part they have been love songs. I don't much like classical music, because it is boring. Human brains back then did not move very fast, I guess. There are some nice pieces, mostly from the Baroque, but they are typically embedded in an hour of dull musical babble which is repeated over and over. I don't think we stand on the shoulders of giants; I think we stand on the shoulders of dwarfs, only there is a whole lot of them so it does add up.

In the late 1990s I developed a taste for electronic music of the time: Ambient, trance and dance. This lasted until recently, but never replaced my previous tastes completely. Over the last year or so, I have preferred Japanese pop music, or J-pop as it is commonly known. This is because I watch a lot of anime, and these songs are typically used at the beginning and end of each episode. Some of the songs are created specifically for this use, but most are not. The songs may sound a bit strange at first, because they typically stretch the melody a little to accommodate the lyrics. The melody is not quite the same from one verse to another in many cases. But overall it is quite cute, and most of my favorite songs these days come from Japan.

I guess all this says something about me. If you can figure out what, more power to you!