My Musical Culture

 Our first blog posts are going to have several purposes: 1. To get you into the habit of writing about music, 2. To prompt you to figure out how to use certain tech aspects of Blogger, and 3. To let us get to know something  about each other's musical experiences and preferences. And, if we're lucky, you'll all get to learn about a music that you didn't already know about but find yourself enjoying!

Here's your blog topic. I want you to write about the types of music in your personal world and specific pieces or artists that you find especially important. Specifically, I want you to tell us three things:

1. Share with us an example of music that is your current go-to. Something that you might throw onto Spotify (or equivalent) for any reason that you care to share. Basically, something that you like right now, for no other reason than you just like it.
2. Share with us an example of music that is personally meaningful, and has been for awhile. It can be attached to a specific event or person, from your childhood or your college years, or just something that has resonated with you for a long time. 
3. Share with us an example of music that, for whatever reason, you just don't really connect with or understand. But as you're writing about it, see if you can convey your thoughts in respectful language--after all, someone somewhere would probably cite that song in one of the first two categories.
4. This one's optional: if there's any other music you'd like to share with us that isn't covered in the first three categories, do so. But tell us why.

As you share these pieces, here are a few ground rules. You can't just post the piece--you need to tell us something about it and why it fits into that category. Tell us a story, if you can. And you need to actually share the music with us. The best way to do that is to actually embed the video (if you have a video).  Click on the "Insert Video" in the icons above the window you type in and follow the instructions. If for some reason your particular video is out-of-the-ordinary and won't embed, at least provide a link by using the Insert Link function. Hot tip: if your video window seems small, click on the little pencil icon in the upper LH corner and choose "HTML View." That view has a bunch of computer code info. Locate the word "height" and replace the number after it with 400, and then locate the word "width" and replace the number after it with 750. Voila! your videos are larger! And, believe it or not, you just did a simple computer coding maneuver! 

Oh, and start the blog post telling us at least a little bit about yourself, so that we have an idea of your background. I'd love it if you'd include a picture of yourself, so we can start to recognize each other. We're looking for a total of at least 400 words here (my example is almost 700.)

To get us started, here's My Musical Culture:

Hi all! I'm Dr. Kelly McElrath Vaneman, and I'm the professor of this class. I've been a musician my whole life. I started both piano lessons and church choir when I was six, but I'd been singing my own little songs and banging on the piano even earlier than that--basically, I've been musicking as long as I can remember. In middle school, I started playing the oboe, and from that point on I knew I'd basically be a professional musician of some sort for the rest of my life. 

I grew up in West Texas, in the mid-sized town of San Angelo. I've lived in a number of places in Texas, but between graduating from Baylor and starting teaching at Converse I also lived in Connecticut, New York City, and Brussels, Belgium. I love my life here in Spartanburg--my husband also teaches at Converse in music, our 17-year-old kid attends the SC Governor's School for Math and Science, and our dog Biscuit believes deeply in walks and treats :-) 

So, obviously, music is a central  part of my life. And I'd like to share some of that importance with you.

1. An example (or two) of something that I like right now: 

As I said above, I lived and studied for a year in Belgium between finishing my doctoral studies and coming to Converse. 1995-1996, specifically. There were two songs that were played incessantly all over Europe that year--the Macarena (you can look that one up on your own), and Scatman's World. I LOVED Scatman John. Scatman John was an American jazz pianist with a severe stutter who discovered, like many stutters before him, that his stutter fell away when he sang, and he especially got into jazz scat singing (singing using syllables like "bop-be-bop-do-wop" instead of words). And his song "Scatman's World" was a huge hit in Europe in 1995. Fast-forward to about 1999, and my husband spent a significant amount of time burning CDs off of tunes he found on Napster, including one of tunes I especially liked, like "Scatman's World." 

So, why is this a music I like right now, you ask, when the 1990s were so far in the past? Well, my kid is currently at the Governor's School for Math and Science in Hartsville, SC, which is a five-hour round trip that I've made many, many times since last August. So I've been going through my CD collection to keep me occupied on that long trip. And I rediscovered "Scatman's World" and have been playing it constantly in my car. It just makes me happy :-)

Another song that I've been listening to a lot lately is the Voces8 recording of "Underneath the Stars." Voces8 is a classical voice octet from England that performed at Converse last fall, and I love them. It was an absolutely stunning concert--I actually teared up at a few points. It's been a fairly stressful last few weeks, so I'll listen to this before I head to bed to try and clear my mind of the many, many tasks I'm trying to remember to complete.

[Addendum, Feb 3, 9:38 am: After I initially posted this blog entry, I kept listening to "Underneath the Stars" a few times, winding down. Just before I went to close my computer, I checked Facebook, as I am wont to do. The top post told me of the death of a member of my extended community that afternoon. Rob and his family had been important to our family for a couple of years awhile back--he and my mother-in-law were in the same brain tumor support group, and our daughters were the same age, and so we'd get them together to play while the old folks got supported. After my mother-in-law died, we drifted apart, but we've still enjoyed seeing each other's kids grow up online. Rob was a fellow musician--a choir member and conductor and a teacher of music history--and it seemed apt that I was listening to Voces8 sing "go gently...go gently..." as I read of his passing. So this song is suddenly more appropriate for the next category than this one. That happens sometimes.]

2. An example of music thats deeply important to me. Now, I like lots and lots and lots of different kinds of music, but, by training, I'm a classical musician, and I have been for as much of my life as I can remember. I don't even remember learning to read music, though I do remember crawling up on my grandmother's piano bench when I was about three and pretending to play out of her Baptist Hymnal (I'm sure it was really, really bad....). And out of all the classical composers that I love, the absolute center of my heart belongs to Johann Sebastian Bach. I've played huge amounts of his music, and love every bit of it. One special piece of Bach's for me is the Sarabande from his solo flute Partita. I've played it on my oboe many times--the first time, though, was as a tribute to my teacher at Yale when he passed away. I've never recorded it, but here is a lovely version played by another oboist.

3. An example of a music I don't really connect with. OK, this one's tricky for me because, as I said, I like lots and lots of music. For instance, I really like the Beatles--so many of their songs are wonderful in so many ways. But, for some reason, I absolutely cannot handle their song "Come Together." It just creeps me out! It might be because the first time I heard it was during the Bee Gee's movie "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band," a movie based on Beatles songs performed by other folks in the late 1970s and possibly the worst movie ever made. "Come Together" was performed by Aerosmith, and I think their weird strutting at the captured Strawberry Fields (that's the girl's name) just was more than 9-year-old me could handle. To be fair, though, I know that lots of my friends really like the song. Objectively, I get it--but I still find it unnerving to listen to! Here's the clip from the film:

4. Bonus round! In recent years, I've been doing a certain amount of music composing. Summer of 2019, I decided that I wanted to write a piece for me, my husband, and our kid  to perform. The trick, though, is that Dr. Mr. Vaneman and I are both professional musicians, but Tally, while a good high school pianist and singer and percussionist, is in a very different place in her musical journey. So I wrote the following piece for us--instead of playing an instrument, Tally claps and stomps and snaps. Tal might be young, but her sense of rhythm is fantastic! The video is from a video we made the Covid summer of 2020 for Together SpARTanburg, a consortium of arts organizations in Spartanburg that came together to create and share artistic content online during quarantine. Here is "Third Wheel," performed by my little family in our living room.

This blog entry is due on Saturday, February 12, by 11:59 pm. Over the following week, you'll be asked to read four of your classmates' blogs and leave substantive comments on them. Details on how you should actually turn those two assignments can be found in the Assignment portals on Canvas. A final tip: before you publish your blog entry, click on "Preview" in the upper RH corner and proofread your entry--I always find typos or things I'd like to change.