Music Appreciation
So something hit me today that i had never really taken much notice of before: My parents never really listened to music when me and my brothers were growing up, which is really odd because my mom was a music major in college. Every once in a while, they would put on a classical tape, but nothing from pop culture at the time. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are musical, they always have sung in choir and my mom sings solos every once in a while. I just didn’t hear a lot of music when I was a kid. Our church in L.A. was VERY conservative and 99% of the time was just vocals and piano (sometimes organ). It’s not like it was that small of a church, that was just the style of music they liked. So overall, i didn’t hear much variety of music when i was a kid. In fact, i didn’t own or listen to CDs until i was 13. Never listened to the radio, never went to a single concert until I was 16. Most of the musicians I know were influenced by and shaped by the music they heard around them as a kid and what their parents listened to. It gives them a passion for music and for the instruments involved. It’s no wonder I hated piano lessons. If I had listened to Coldplay or Keane when I was a kid (if they had been around), I think I would have been more passionate about it. I had musical discipline, but no musical influences.
So on the opposite spectrum, my wife, Alison, had a WIDE range of music she had heard when she was a kid. From a very young age, her parents were constantly playing music they had a passion for listening to. Seeing that, Alison grew a respect for those artists and still listen to a lot of them to this day. They are her influences, what gave her a passion for music. But she had very little music discipline when it came to playing musical instruments (she played clarinet for about a year). My gut tells me that she might have treated clarinet differently if the music she listened to and was passionate about featured clarinet….but that’s just speculation.
So what’s to take away from this? I still really don’t know. I’m just rambling at this point. I think what I’m trying to say is that I think true musical discipline mostly arises from influences at a young age. A coworker of mine asked me yesterday what he should do for his 8-year-old son to get him to play piano (he already likes to sing and piano is fundamental to learning music theory). I told him the best thing he could do is buy him a DVD of Coldplay in concert. Passionate influences gives birth to true musical discipline. Not the other way around. Does that mean that I’m an anomaly? I’m not sure. The fact that I was “heavily encouraged” to keep playing piano, even though I didn’t want to, was the best for me. Even though I had NO musical influence driving me to play, without that, I don’t think I would have learned guitar. What do you guys think? Musicians, what were your musical influences as a kid? Did you have them? Do you agree with the phrase “Passionate influences gives birth to true musical discipline“?
Musings 