Now THAT is Music

Just about everybody has an opinion on music. Everybody has a favorite and a least favorite band. Everybody has a song that just reaches their core and pulls their emotional strings as far as they can stretch. On the opposite side everybody has a song that from the first note just disgusts them and their insides just groan in agony from having heard it. It is difficult, if not impossible, to judge what is good and what is trash with something so subjective as music. All we have are individual's preferences. Sure we can try to quantify it by #1 hits, record sales, harmonic complexity, or the test of time, but using those arguments hardly convinces anyone to change their preferences. How do we know what's good? I don't know, but I'll tell you what I think is good.

I now live in an area where there is a multitude of radio stations to choose from. Sadly, I mostly stick to two. I listen to the classical station and the jazz station. I could throw in the sports radio station that I occasionally listen to but that doesn't have much to do with music. This morning the first piece of music I heard was Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. What a way to start the day! Later on I heard Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor. Even when I reached my destination I just sat in my truck and listened to it until the final movement was done. It was magnificent! It was played by Sir James Galway, the second greatest flutist I've ever heard live. The greatest was my own girlfriend, of course. The other day I heard Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 The Pathetique. Yesterday I heard the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2. in C minor. After all these pieces of the music I just said to myself, "Now that is music." It is so deep, so complex, and yes, it has withstood an adequate test of time.

If you read my last blog you know I do have my favorites in the genre of pop/rock. But what I hear when I'm flipping around mainstream radio today is awful. Even most of what they play on retro radio stations does not please my ears. There is one station that says, "tired of listening to the same boring radio? Tune in to us...". I tried that and found out that they're just like the rest of them that I don't like. Almost everyday I try to listen to the popular radio stations and I hear a song that I like maybe 10% of the time. That's probably stretching it. Why is that? How come what mainstream radio wants us to listen to is so bad? Is it the bell-shaped curve principle? Like I said, I don't know. But its okay, the world can keep American Idol and I'll keep listening to the classical and jazz stations along with a handful of other people.