The More You Know
My parents were professional classical musicians and I owe my musical education to them, with one caveat.
Growing up, I was immersed in classical music. My first word was hotel because we traveled so much for their gigs. I started taking lessons somewhere between 3 and 6 years old because my parents strongly believed that music should be a part of every young person’s education. I owe them a lot for the musical exposure they gave me during the most formative years of my life.
And here comes the caveat. Our household never really had any type of music in it other than classical music. As I grew up, I expressed interest in other forms of music like any curious kid might do, but was always met with the response that classical and jazz were the only forms of true art music, that everything else was commercial noise with loud drums and no nuance. I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much. The effect was that by the time I’d reached 18, I had a great education and aptitude for classical music - indeed I’d won 1st Chair in the All-State auditions as well as college scholarships - but had heard very little popular music aside from a few CDs that I’d managed to buy over the years, plus some jazz CD’s and a Beatles compilation album. Other than that, my only exposure to popular music was the local radio station which I would often listen to in the car after getting my driver’s license.
After high school I gained a bit more freedom which allowed me to explore musically. I took a gap year in New Zealand where I discovered incredible artists like Kimbra. I also spent a lot of time experimenting in Garageband, which I’d had a bit of previous experience with in middle and high school.
But it wasn’t until I went to college that I really began to discover the rest of the musical world outside of the classical and jazz canons and Top 40 radio. Whether I was getting recommendations from friends, trawling the internet to learn about pop and underground music history, or listening through entire back catalogs of famous bands and artists on streaming services, this was an intensive period of discovering and studying the western history of recorded music, from hip-hop to art-rock, music concréte to techno, and everywhere in between. I even listened to music that I didn’t like, just to expose myself to what was out there. I felt like I was catching up on lost time, discovering an entire musical universe I hadn’t even known existed.
Meanwhile, I was working as an audio engineer, mostly recording classical and jazz performances within the music department at my university. But I started to branch out soon, getting into freelance recording and mixing as well as live sound at clubs and other venues around the area.
One of my live sound jobs was particularly memorable. I was working for a non-profit that supported artists and helped arrange their tours in an effort to keep the Mississippi Blues alive. I wasn’t particularly taken with this genre of music when I started the job, but in my role as a live sound engineer, I had to listen and pay attention to what made the music good in order to help create a good sound for the musicians I was working with. This mini-education was yet another in a long string of examples in which I exposed myself to music I didn’t particularly enjoy, only to find that the reason I didn’t enjoy it was because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t speak the language yet but found that through exposure I could slowly learn the language/dialect of that music and begin to enjoy and appreciate it for its unique mechanisms and eccentricities.
Like many kids, I guess my interests were a type of rebellion against my strict musical upbringing. I think of this experimental and exploratory phase as the second half of my musical education. It was through my rebellious curiosity for what else was out there in the world, through my experience working with many other varieties of musical language, that I came to a firsthand appreciation for the fact that there is no such thing as musical supremacy. Yes, some music is better than others, but it has nothing to do with genre or even the number of years a composer or instrumentalist studies their craft. As much as we may tend to build it up in our heads, music is ultimately nothing more than a form of expression, and anybody can express themselves - self expression is a basic component of being human after all. Our ability to interpret and derive meaning from the self-expression of other people is almost entirely up to our ability to understand the language and idioms they use to do so. If we don’t like what they have to say, it’s likely that we just haven’t listened long enough.