Musics


{under construction}

I consider the musical to be one of the primary facets of my being and identity, but my engagement is largely unshared and idiosyncratically developed, and remains mostly closeted A victimless crime? Mostly a solitary pastime, which is true of many of my enthusiasms. Sometimes I wonder if everybody has such secret lives (pocketa pocketa) and highly elaborated realms of personal knowledge, which would be shared gleefully if only some interlocutors could be found, and if it was clear where to begin. I mean, who else would care about the music of Epirus, or the finer points of long-necked lute-family instruments, or the backstories of various genres?

Some of us have intense musical lives, in which we are entangled in musics of various kinds, as listeners, as players, as students of genres and histories and biographies, as presiders over musical collections, both as realia (sheet music, shellac, vinyl, CD etc etc) and stored as traces in memory [How Much is thatDoggie in the Window...].

Musical engagement is variable within cultures: Horatio Hornblower famously found music painful to his ears. On the other hand,

My musical (and graphic and textual) enthusiasms and entanglements are surely idiosyncratic, the products of many encounters served up by stochastically inclined fates who have played me for 80+ years, and largely thanks to a long series of teachers and friends and curiosities and fascinations. The same may be true of all lives, but my own catalog makes narrative sense to me: I can see (in the rear-view mirror) how I went from A to B to C and so forth, and I appreciate how much of my hopscotch progress rests on happenstance and coincidence. Not much was carefully planned, though in hindsight it all seems consistent, with not much out-of-the-blue sheer random deus ex machina...

I wrote a musical autobiography and further ruminations in 2005, but there's a lot to catch up on.the 20 years since retirement.

After 2005, the audience for whatever I was up to musically contracted right down to my own very very self, and the technological changes continued to unfold, including (1) proliferation of mp3 files, (2) YouTube music videos, and (3) streaming services.

  1. The mp3 format encouraged easy accumulation of lots of music, and after 2005 I happily downloaded many gigabytes to external drives, but I did pretty minimal curation of the hoard (sorting by categories, but unsystematically), and many of the mp3 files I collected never got heard —they still await my attention.
  2. YouTube has opened the new frontier of watching the making of music, and once again my impulse has been to collect but minimally curate. It is easy to put together web pages of videos discovered:
    July 2023 - September 2024 and Broken Peach are examples of that mode of array and curation and distribution.
  3. Streaming services like Spotify provide much of the ambient music of the present, and my world in that medium is primarily Baroque and pre-Baroque. The algorithms of Spotify and YouTube keep me supplied with what those services reckon my tastes and interests to be, but neither really understands the questing nature of my musical minds.
  4. My vinyl collection is only occasionally visited, but has a sort of primitive access via jpgs of album covers, which are all numbered. I remember what's on those albums quite clearly, and much of my musical education (1960s and 1970s especially) is rooted in album liner notes.
  5. The many and varied CDs don't have (yet) any better access than being shelved by genres (all the Bach together, likewise the Scandinavian and Blues and British Isles and Greek and Turkish and and and), and quite a few of those CDs haven't been played in recent years —but are joys awaiting rediscovery. I do wish that their liner notes were accessible digitally.
  6. The radio access to music that was once so important has vanished completely, though I still have many casette tapes of WHRB Orgies, recorded by brother David. All the cassette tapes are essentially wall decorations. I have the wherewithal to play them, but (as with VHS tapes) I scarcely ever explore their contents.

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So I preside over a lifetime of collected musics, and a large library of books on musics of many persuasions, and I continue to add to that bibliographic panoply as irresistible new titles appear. A recent case in point is Joe Boyd ('64) And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music , and (to give you an idea of the range) among other recent acquisitions are

Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio
Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records
American Epic: The First Time America Heard Itself
Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: America changed through music
Don't Get above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class
Arhoolie Records Down Home Music: The Stories and Photographs of Chris Strachwitz
Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s

Each of those is an odyssey.

As for the instruments I harbor and binge upon, my pas de deux with Jake Wildwood is a tip of the iceberg. My experiments with luthierie have waned (I mean —with friends like Jake...), and only one of those instruments really worked, a 4-course cittern in the keeping of my main musical co-conspirator Daniel Heïkalo:

Here are most of my experiments in building, each sporting some fatal flaw:

4x2401

The 'saz' (3rd from left) did have some noteworthy success
until its neck warped and it was retired to the Museum:

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And here's how it happens: Bandcamp sends me notice of a new release like Semar Pegulingan IV by Bali Gamelan Sound. I listen to some of it, become entranced, order the mp3... Keeps happening, moving my musical involvement ever outward.