WHEN YOUNG MEETS OLD AND CONNECTS

My young friend was born when most of my children were nearing high school graduation. We have been educating each other on a musical era I lived through and he is now just learning. He is educating me on music he knows, historically in his shorter life, which bypassed me in the last 30 years. I am exposing him to music that existed in a genre that still exists today but not in spheres he frequents.

Last night we did a 'you-play-one, then I'll play one' music exchange. He played the Star Wars sound track by John Williams and I played Holst's The Planets. We both observed the similarities of sound and feeling, changes in pace, and shared what one experiences in listening to both. I was introduced to a better understanding of bands such as ACDC, Van Halen, Guns and Roses, Smash Mouth, Jet, God Smack, Eagles, System of Down, Arrowsmith, and even Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Air Men. He heard the purity of vocals by a young Chet Baker and trumpet playing, and to him boring, Mel Torme vocals. However, he also learned that many great vocalists played a musical instrument well, which influenced their vocal interpretation. Mel Torme played Drums, Sarah Vaughan played piano. I played a video of the George Shearing Quartet playing Claude Bolling's Suite for Guitar and Claude Bolling's writing was more intricate and required greater virtuosity, but both were exciting to hear. Since my friend loves cats, I played Eddie Bracken and Carol Channing doing Archie and Mehitabel, written in 1916 by a NY reporter, Don Marquis. It came to life in the 50's with a stunning musical background and was later made into a movie in 1971, titled Shinbone Alley.

My friend correctly observed that our criteria for music differs. He listens to lyrics more than I. I listen to harmony and chord structures, pitch, precision, tempo and balance. He listens to raspy voices that try to shout over the band's volume; I listen to bands which furnish a soft, melodic background for the vocalist. He listens to rhythm that overpowers all else; I listen for rhythm that adds an unfailing tempo and sets mood, equally as his does, but overpowers nothing. He appreciates many genres, so do I. We concluded that we both pick a limited amount from many genres though our basic criteria may differ.

Recalling how my husband loved classical music while I thought it boring and too full of violins, I realized that somewhere in the last 10 or more years, I have come to really love much of classical music and, having been exposed to more, have become more able to be selective. Without doubt, my musical taste has changed. I no longer listen only to a single genre like New Orleans Jazz or Dixieland. Whether one reaches a saturation point or finds more agreeable music to hear, or there are other reasons that alter one's taste over time, I leave that conclusion to the reader's introspection.

My conclusion is that there are always good musicians around. Ability for good musicianship is built in at birth and perfected by training and practice. Whether musicians are heard depended for a long while on non-musical agents and producers who picked and hyped lots of poor quality music, forcing listeners to hear the only things, primarily through radio and CD sales. This does not differ in the world of symphonic music, either. Maestro Levine of the Boston Symphony Orchestra insists he will force Boston audiences to like modern music such as by Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen. Despite masses of the audience walking out when these are played, the Board of Directors persist in allowing their conductor to force people to listen to what the majority don't want to hear rather than presenting music for which they pay large sums of money to hear.

Whether you are musically educated or not, seems not to effect musical taste. People hear and prefer music that does what they want it to do for them; calm, excite, stay in memory, create moods, make people want to get up and dance, touch their heart, and all the many things that music does for people. As the world slowly changes its tastes and musical offerings, it reflects sociological times. While I am not a serious analyst of these changes, it is fun to listen to music, find out what was going on in the world when it was written, and note how often it becomes popular long after the time in which it was written because it fits better today.

The one commonality we all have is that there is music out there for all of us, even the deaf who can often revel in feeling tempos vibrate through their bodies.