We communicate essentially through sounds and gesture. All animals do. Could one imagine a world without music? Imagine the silence, eerie, heavy and some how scary, a silence where loneliness would prevail, a world where communication died. I don’t know about you but I know that I could not live in such a silent word. So what is music? Did we, human, invent music? Music with vocals, music with instruments? No we did not! Mother Nature did.
Everywhere there are sounds and all sounds lead to music, from the Universe back ground noise, which we believe comes from the Big Bang, (even though it still remains to be demonstrated), to the enchanting melody of the river, the tweets of the black bird, the roar of the thunder. All around us is music. All is colours. Talking about colours, we all know that colours are pretty much relative to their wavelength. There are infinite varieties of wave lengths therefore infinite varieties of shades and tones. The magical rainbow, which I like to call the Arc of Light, is visible to everyone. Splendour in the sky, the Arc makes us dream. The rainbow is the tiara of the skies, the crown of the firmament. Like there is an Arc of Light, the rainbow, is there an Arc of music, somewhere we could, just like for the colours, find all the different shades of melodies, the different harmonies? We cannot open our ears like we can open our eyes.
Everywhere there are sounds and all sounds lead to music, from the Universe back ground noise, which we believe comes from the Big Bang, (even though it still remains to be demonstrated), to the enchanting melody of the river, the tweets of the black bird, the roar of the thunder. All around us is music. All is colours. Talking about colours, we all know that colours are pretty much relative to their wavelength. There are infinite varieties of wave lengths therefore infinite varieties of shades and tones. The magical rainbow, which I like to call the Arc of Light, is visible to everyone. Splendour in the sky, the Arc makes us dream. The rainbow is the tiara of the skies, the crown of the firmament. Like there is an Arc of Light, the rainbow, is there an Arc of music, somewhere we could, just like for the colours, find all the different shades of melodies, the different harmonies? We cannot open our ears like we can open our eyes.
Watching the rainbow is easy, you just have to look at it. But dreaming the rainbow is a lot harder. One has to use imagination, hope, poetry. In this respect one can just in the same way, dream music. The composer listens, dreams and produces what we call music, a succession of sounds agreeable to someone’s’ ears. If it is not agreeable then it is not music, it is just noise. All is relative to preferences. What is agreeable to my ears might not be agreeable to yours. It is a bit like food. I hate liver! You might relish it? Yet this is not entirely true. One can learn to like! I know it sounds farfetched, but it is not. The very principal of advertisements is precisely to make people like a product. Of course this “indoctrination” is for economical reasons only. Basically the publicist is after your money. But for food it is different. It is for your own benefit. If you accustom your taste buds (French : papilles gustatives) to eat a bit of every thing, especially if this happens at a very early age, later in life you will be able to have a much more balanced diet. It is a well known fact that people who eat only preserves dislike fresh food! What a shame is it not! Music is the same.
When I was a child I used to profoundly dislike classical music. There were several reasons for this. Firstly we were not particularly rich; therefore opera tickets would have been too expensive. Therefore I did not get a taste to opera; I did not understand its sounds. Secondly my parents were not keen on the thing either. Without betraying my age I can tell you that we had no television, no record players, and only wireless radio. What I knew about music were crooners from top of the pop on radio Luxembourg or Europe number One. Living in Paris I had heard about the Beatles but hardly about Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. France is musically very old fashion. Even today the French taste in music is still pretty much orientated to the “chanteur de charme”. Yet it had its advantages.
I was lucky to be born at a time Edith Piaf and Maria Callas were at the pick of their career. Strange mixture I must admit. Also idols such as Elvis Presley and Pavarotti came to shape my musical preferences. Together with my age, my musical liking grew wider and more varied. I was lucky. I started to really like classical music at school, when I was about 11 years old. I had the chance to go and see William Tell and Don Giovanni at a local theatre and even a couple of ballets (Swan Lake and Gisele). This determined my future tastes in music. I hade found the Arc of Music, my music rainbow! Today younger generations are luckier than I was. Many opera singers perform in more popular theatres and not just in Opera houses. The ticket prices are often a lot more affordable. Classical music is often popularised in more trivial songs by artists who are not necessarily tenors or sopranos but use classical scores. In other words the genres are crossing over. In the past there was some sort of frontier between the genres. A piece was classed as either classical or pop. Today, fortunately, those borders are fading. Classical music has been made accessible. The population at large has learnt to like all sort of music, from rap (which I must admit I still profoundly dislike), to pop and Classical opera. Crossover means precisely this. No more frontiers. This is the triumph of Classical crossover!
By: Le Prince de Monte Cristo
When I was a child I used to profoundly dislike classical music. There were several reasons for this. Firstly we were not particularly rich; therefore opera tickets would have been too expensive. Therefore I did not get a taste to opera; I did not understand its sounds. Secondly my parents were not keen on the thing either. Without betraying my age I can tell you that we had no television, no record players, and only wireless radio. What I knew about music were crooners from top of the pop on radio Luxembourg or Europe number One. Living in Paris I had heard about the Beatles but hardly about Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. France is musically very old fashion. Even today the French taste in music is still pretty much orientated to the “chanteur de charme”. Yet it had its advantages.
I was lucky to be born at a time Edith Piaf and Maria Callas were at the pick of their career. Strange mixture I must admit. Also idols such as Elvis Presley and Pavarotti came to shape my musical preferences. Together with my age, my musical liking grew wider and more varied. I was lucky. I started to really like classical music at school, when I was about 11 years old. I had the chance to go and see William Tell and Don Giovanni at a local theatre and even a couple of ballets (Swan Lake and Gisele). This determined my future tastes in music. I hade found the Arc of Music, my music rainbow! Today younger generations are luckier than I was. Many opera singers perform in more popular theatres and not just in Opera houses. The ticket prices are often a lot more affordable. Classical music is often popularised in more trivial songs by artists who are not necessarily tenors or sopranos but use classical scores. In other words the genres are crossing over. In the past there was some sort of frontier between the genres. A piece was classed as either classical or pop. Today, fortunately, those borders are fading. Classical music has been made accessible. The population at large has learnt to like all sort of music, from rap (which I must admit I still profoundly dislike), to pop and Classical opera. Crossover means precisely this. No more frontiers. This is the triumph of Classical crossover!
By: Le Prince de Monte Cristo