From The Curator
I am a musician.
I’ve spent most of my life learning to play instruments and studying music – history, theory, composition, performance. A lifetime’s pursuit, the study of music is never complete.
Having a deep-rooted musical knowledge opens the door to experience music in a way that is almost indescribable. The best I can do is to liken it to a botanist’s appreciation of a leaf; every part of it has meaning to one who has learned how and of what a leaf is made.
To the “Average Harry” (I have a good friend Joe that resents his name’s use in such a generic manner. I don’t have any friends named Harry. Well, except for maybe Harry Potter) a leaf is pretty – perhaps, at times beautiful. To the botanist, the leaf is sublime; it is mystery. It is a treasure trove of wonders that both asks and answers questions about life and existence. It is so much more than a pretty color; it is the blade, the petiole, the veins, the margin, and the midrib.
In truth, I find leaves most marvelous when the colors change en masse each autumn. And, the botanist can certainly appreciate leaves this way. But like a master craftsmen, the botanist cannot help but want to get a close-up, in-depth view of even just single leaf, to study it and to marvel at it.
This is the way that I listen to music. Like most, I first hear the forest, yet I yearn to pore over each leaf and find the treasures it hides.
But a problem arises. Unlike the natural world, with all its complex systems of adaptation and perpetuation, music-making does not have a controlling force that squeezes from the raw materials an artifact of worth by default. Certainly some leaves are more interesting to certain leaf-lovers than others, but it is seems unlikely that there are leaves, which upon closer inspection, elicit a melancholy, “This leaf should never have been made. It’s a crappy leaf.”
Listening with a critical ear then, leaves me with a relatively small cross-section of “leaf music.” Usually I hear a tune on the web, iTunes, or . . . (dang it, what’s that thing that you have to put on a certain number to hear some music, otherwise it’s just static? Um. Radiator? Radial? Radiation? No, no. RADIO! That’s it!) radio, and quickly find that the particular piece of music is a forest without leaves. In the past, I would have made it a point to announce that I disdained said music and wished there were a filter for music that would create a forest of leaves for me to discover and revel in. Now I simply make a small point about it and move on. (And perhaps one day I’ll mature enough to not say anything at all and spare my friends and co-workers the verbiage.)
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