Things is the name of a piano piece that my sixteen-year-old just wrote for his end-of-semester recital at the local junior college. He was somewhat hesitant about taking the class when we discussed it back in August, but he seems to have mostly enjoyed it, now that the semester is in the rear view mirror.
Anyway, the event was last night… so here’s Jesse at the recital. As you can probably detect (if you have a few threads of Sherlock Holmesian DNA woven into your deerstalker cap), I’m immensely proud of him.
I’m not sure what the relevance of the name is to the music, but it is undeniable that music is made up of things. Math, frequencies, emotion, sound waves, patterns, vibrations, timbre, pitch, the displacement of air, strange organizations and arrangements of wood, metal, fibre, etc that are sculpted together into various instruments. And creativity, of course.
Music is a strange one. It’s decidedly odd that we (the humans) find it collectively appealing, attractive, inspiring, haunting–all manners of responses that are common to vast multiples of people. True, I might not find certain tonal patterns and scales of other cultures appealing, but it is equally true that vast numbers of those cultures genuinely find them appealing.
Music and sunsets. The affable golden retriever is impressed by neither. Which really does beg a few questions about what exactly we are as humans. And what we are not, seeing that we aren’t golden retrievers, rhinos, gerbils, etc.