Even in Kyoto

Last Sunday, I went on a return trip to RadioShack, to track down the correct size of adapter for a Bose portable CD player I received many years ago. The laser on the CD player on the "ghettoblaster" boombox has gone out of focus, so the only other method I had for playing CDs was to hook up the external CD drive to my computer and then run an audio cable from the computer to the boombox, thus tethering the computer in place. I am so glad to have a functional CD player system again, plus my CD collection, out of the storage pod.

Theoretically, I could also just save all of my music to my hard drive, but stuff gets lost that way because I just don't think in filenames, and there's a bunch of junk mixed in with the music files I actually want to listen to. Encountering the music physically as I flip through the stacks of CDs brings up a separate set of memories. Albums really are a correct unit for music.

I would say that well over half of this CD collection consists of stuff I only listen to by myself. In groups or even just with S, I let other people dominate the music selection. Some of it is stuff that dates back to high school - the old Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco albums, for instance, but also the soundtrack to Pi and American Beauty, and a lot of the classical piano music (I didn't keep the Alanis Morisette album, however, heh). I haven't listened to Tori Amos or Ani DiFranco in years (over a decade?), but lately I keep thinking of the very first DiFranco album, especially the sentiments about being a stranger in a new city. But a portion of my collection is newer as well - it was wonderful to be introduced to Laura Veirs and Neko Case by friends during graduate school. Finding the right sort of marimba music, too, has taken a considerable amount of effort (so happy to have discovered Casey Cangelosi on the InterTube!), and I only recently bought two George Winston albums because it's good music when trying to write because of its earnestness (and lack of words).

I also come back repeatedly to certain ambient sounds, like the Sounds and Songs of the Humpback Whales, and Paul Horn's original Inside the Taj Mahal, as they bring a sense of peace. Those, plus that one album of Beethoven Piano Sonatas (played by Ekaterina Murina), are on my Desert Island list.

When I have to do a lot of emotional processing, I really, really miss having a piano to play.

One of my favorite things about attending Tufts was its association with the New England Music Conservatory. That association meant there was an incredible crop of musical resources on campus. I benefited from that expertise for the single semester I could afford the time and money to take piano lessons there, and from the countless free recitals offered on campus. Oh, and had so much fun the semester I took music theory. If only I had taken it sooner, my sight-reading and piano playing would have benefited from it tremendously. I was a poor music student, though, with respect to diligence in practicing, so I wrote my own fate there. Sigh. Some day I will have a piano again and will play it. Probably never as well as I did back then, but still.

I don't think I'll ever forget that one jazz improv recital I attended where the pianist just oozed joy as his fingers rippled across the keys. Nor will I ever forget the piano recital of a work of contemporary classical music where every note the pianist played on the keyboard was echoed by two synthesized notes, one and two octaves above the played note. The pianist wryly remarked to us that while he was learning the piece, it was humbling to have every single mistake amplified and repeated twice immediately thereafter. If I thought the stakes were high to begin with when playing a piano piece, boy.

I still wish I knew the name of that second piece so I could track it down and have a listen again. For a while, I saved the programs from those recitals, and tore a line next to the songs that stuck with me, but sometime between my junior year of college and when I graduated and moved back to Seattle, I recycled those old programs. I am still kicking myself for that. It's extremely difficult to track down contemporary classical music, or even to find recitals/concerts to attend. Most radio stations that play classical music just play the old crap. I mean, it's nice enough, but the contemporary stuff is mind-blowing. Seattle's classical station at least plays a lot from live performances, but even then, live performances wind up being a mixture of what's popular (the old stuff) and what's innovative.

Anyway, today. Today, I was listening to a CD called World of Marimba, by Gilmar Goulet. I hunted down the CD from the Tufts music library after I'd attended a composition class recital, where all of the pieces written in the composition class were played by a woman on a marimba. I'd never heard such an incredible sound. She wielded four mallets simultaneously (like this). After that recital, I realized there was no way to obtain recordings from that particular recital, as it was new work written by a composition class just that semester. But I figured if I liked the sound that much, I should try to track down additional marimba music.

Well, that was in the days before YouTube. That was back before Napster was shut down, where people were in the midst of a cultural musical explosion but were still negotiating with corporations and artists over how to give creative people and their supporters their due. I didn't feel like pirating music was the correct thing to do, plus, I received stern warnings from my father on the subject. So the stuff from the music library was the extent of the marimba music I was able to track down. So hard to search for music by instrument type at that time.

Just today, I finally realized I can just use YouTube to track down more of this stuff. I cannot explain what marimba music does to my brain, but I can tell you that it's caused me to listen to the American Beauty soundtrack more times than can possibly be healthy for anybody (for the record, Thomas Newman also recently pointed out in an interview that his compositions tend to be percussive, which could explain why I tend to like his film soundtracks).

But really. Just listen! It's incredible! Here, for instance, is a top YouTube hit.

And now I should really get back to work. While listening to a few new songs.