When I first got this topic I really thought I would not have much to say about my experiences with non-western music, but as today went on all these lost memories flooded my head. Although some of my experiences are not really involved experiences with music from other cultures they have still influenced me in some way and exposed me to other ideas.
Being a child of a military family I have moved around a lot. I started in Nebraska, then to Germany, and then to New Mexico, where I have my first clear memories of music from other cultures. I lived in a place called Alamogordo. There wasn't really much to do but ride up to the little mountain towns. It was there that I first experienced native American music. I got to see a lot of the drums and dances. Any festival going on around where I lived always had lots of native American music about and there where yearly visits to schools on base which involved performances with all kinds of instruments. I then moved to Pennsylvania and then to Mississippi. In Mississippi there was, surprisingly, a large population of Vietnamese people. I had several Vietnamese friends and heard music from the culture every once in a while just in passing. I also dated a Filipino boy in middle school who happened to have a little family band kind of thing. Once they sang and played at church. Where I lived in Mississippi was about forty five minutes from New Orleans. I do not know for sure if the jazz music in New Orleans is considered music of a different culture but I heard a lot of it every year at mardi gras. After some years in Mississippi I ended up here in South Carolina. By the time I got here I was playing my instrument and experiencing music of other cultures first hand. I've played African music in marching band shows, I met Sandip Burman ( an Indian drummer) and saw him perform ten feet in front of my face, I've ran 5k races where Irish bag pipes rang the whole way, I sang a song at church in Spanish, I've listened to my high school gospel choir, I've also heard my high school choir sing songs from around the world, I've played many Spanish inspired songs on my saxophone, I played in a jazz band, and so many other things. I did not realize how much world music I had actually already experienced till today. It's everywhere.
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Good blog, Kathleen. You do have a good amount of World Music experiences! Be sure and pipe up when we get to cultures that you've bumped into and let us know what you've experienced.
ReplyDeleteAnd, in answer to your email, the only way I know to check word count is to copy-and-paste your posting into a Word document. The word check there is probably under "tools."