This evening I\u2019ve been exploring music past. I wanted to hear the music I knew in the 60s and 70s. Someone put up a list of top Australian hits in 1974 and I looked at it and realised that it\u2019s quite different to the music generally associated with that year. We hear about music from the USA, you see, and from the UK.<\/p>\n
I listened to some of the tunes on that list first, but one of the top ten struck me as getting my mood exactly right when it was first released: Helen Reddy\u2019s \u201cLeave Me Alone\u201d was perfect for a proto-teenager.<\/p>\n
I moved onto orchestral music. When I was in primary school and early high school, we went to Melbourne Town Hall and were taught to understand orchestral music. In primary school we were taught the instruments of the orchestra, how the orchestra worked, Peter and the Wolf<\/i>, Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker<\/i>, mainly), Beethoven and\u2026 that\u2019s all I remember. I watched a Bernstein recording and he taught children very different stuff. More the stuff I discovered when I was a teenager. As a teenager I fell in love with Schubert, played in a regional orchestra and the school orchestra (second violin in one, first in the other), and I went to concerts every fortnight. I came from a musical family and went to a standard state school\u2026 which happened to have free music education. I once did a lot of music, and the Bernstein brought the formal education aspect flooding back. My top moment of music learning was when Felix Werder taught me to care for Mahler and when my father\u2019s first cousin taught me how to listen. Linda was a composer and a music judge and a critic, and her random remarks taught me so much. Since that moment, everything has gone downhill\u2026 but\u2026 my evening of music didn\u2019t stop with memories of Mahler and Linda. I was very privileged musically in my childhood, not so much as an adult.<\/p>\n
I sang, of course, some songs I learned from Alfred Deller and also the King\u2019s Singers. They were my personal favourite musicians when I was a teen, and both really annoyed my family. Everyone else was singing ABBA and the bay City Rollers and I was listening to a counter-tenor who sang folk songs. I was informed by my family how very bad my singing is<\/p>\n
Then moved to my final music for the evening. I\u2019m writing to it now. Tom Lehrer. This sentence is being typed to the rhythm of The Vienna Schnitzel Waltz<\/i>. The final note of the night was either going to be Lehrer or Flanders and Swann. The news makes me sarcastic right now, so of course it\u2019s Lehrer.<\/p>\n
And now, of course, I\u2019m very curious about the music of your childhoods. Of course I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This evening I\u2019ve been exploring music past. I wanted to hear the music I knew in the 60s and 70s. Someone put up a list of top Australian hits in 1974 and I looked at it and realised that it\u2019s quite different to the music generally associated with that year. We hear about music from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[636,56],"tags":[615],"class_list":["post-3199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-life-experiences","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3200,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions\/3200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}