Exposition

I guess the only appropriate way to start this blog is to "say" the words I so often find myself saying about music, and that is:

I don't know what to say.

I'm twenty, and in university studying undergraduate music history, with the hopes of continuing musicological study into MA and Ph.D. land. This blog is, I suppose, my attempt to make sense of music, music school, musicianship, etc. It's also a place for me to reflect on the places, people, and adventures music has led (and, I'm sure, will lead me to).

While I love music history and musicology (which is likely an obvious statement; why else would I plan to pursue a very expensive degree process, and then a lifetime of work in it?), I constantly find that I'm chuckling to myself about the paradox of it. Musicology is the academic, scholarly study of music. It's the attempt to categorize, explain, understand. What I've found, beginner that I am, is that it's the attempt (key word being attempt) to express music in words.

Yet music, to me, is beyond words. I'm a singer, and I express myself through song when words alone don't cut it. However, I'm also an intermediate -level pianist, and I play the piano when words can't even begin to touch the things I'm feeling. When my experiences don't seem tangible, that's when I'm most connected to my piano (conversely, it's also when I play Beethoven in excessive amounts).

Like most of my peers, I think music is, at its core, communication. It's our desire to be heard and understood. Except amplified, and on steroids. It's one of the greatest ways to create community, to engage and participate in the world around us. Music requires the ability to come together and connect with others; to an audience, with an instrumentalist or a vocalist. Music is, at its foundation, a communal experience of creation. How do we express that? What it really actually is, to come together in a space, and create something amazing? How can we explain how these sounds have somehow held meaning, to all cultures, and to almost all people, throughout (almost) all ages?

For me, musicology is the search for those understandings of what music really, truly is. The devil is in the details.I study theory, reception, performance practices, opus numbers, cultural and historical contexts, composer biographies, chronologies, et cetera, in an attempt to find answers for those larger questions.

Some people probably think that sounds crazy.

But, when I'm being honest, I can't think of a more meaningful or more exciting way to spend the rest of my life.

So, for those of you who relate to that statement in any way, and don't think it's completely crazy (a little crazy is okay, however; Lord knows I may well be half-crazed when I write some of my insomniac posts):

This blog is for you. :-)