Welcome to The Complete World of Music!
A new substack, offering a collection of articles about everything related to music
Through a life-long interest in music, it has been a pleasure to discover new kinds of music, listen to it and learn what was good about it, why people liked it.
It has been a pleasure to search for something that I would consider as “my” music, the music I liked and by which I would be partly identified. When talking to others about music, on those rare occasions where that happened, the question would almost inevitably be asked, “what kinds of music do you like”?
I found, along the way, that it was difficult to narrow down on just one kind of music, or a few popular musicians or bands, for instance, such as many others would say that they had done. There is so much music in this world, made by so many people with so many thoughts, that I simply can’t ignore all the rest, even when I find something I like.
Music is used by many as such a cultural identifier, and it is used this way for nations as well, when they decide on a “national hymn” or a set of national folk songs to be performed in situations where the national unity should be embraced or confirmed.
It also has some practical uses, such as denoting the time of the day, when a clock on the major square plays a certain melody, or a snippet of it, and everybody knows that this means, for instance, that we now have 12 noon.
Throughout the times, music has been part of theater performances, sometimes just a little, if an entertainer or an orchestra was playing music until the theater performance itself was about to start, and, at other times, the performance has been based on music, from end to end, such as in opera.
And music is today used for identification of TV series or radio programs, either as a full tune made for marking the start and end of the show, or as a jingle, just reminding you, like the clock at the major square, that something is now happening – or, indeed, as a vignette to signify a certain product in a commercial. When hearing that, you’ll be mentally transferred to a state of recognition, almost like when you hear a bird singing and know which bird it is.
For theaters and many other events, incidental music colors the air with tones to supplement the event or fill the gaps, helping to create an ambience that makes you feel captured by what is going on. It happens in a circus, where the slightly exotic but always upbeat and rich music will make your heart beat faster, and you will expect (or fear) something dramatic to take place, and it happens in movies, with more or less the same properties, apart from some of that music being moody or sensitive, or even just a soundscape without any musical patterns – or, most often, a mix of everything, making you feel that the movie moves in time and place, which makes you feel the development.
Along the way, on and off, I have learned to play something myself. For me personally, this has not been a constant factor in my life. I have always been interested, but not always had the support from my surroundings, and as I was also interested in very many other things, I could easily fill out a life without always creating music myself, and instead just enjoying what others created.
But I am currently on a journey to learn a number of instruments, and along with that follows a lot of information about new kinds of music I didn’t know before, and details about the people playing these kinds, and the history and relations to other parts of the music world.
It has always been fascinating to learn how music was played in other parts of the world, with other instruments and other ideas of how music should sound, than we had where I lived. Even more fascinating it has been to see how styles and trends in music tend to move around the globe – so that Latin music, for instance, isn’t just played and listened to in Latin America, or a wider definition of the Latin world, it is also played just about everywhere else on Earth. And similar with most other types of music.
Sometimes, studying the peculiarities of a certain musical instrument has led to the understanding of some connections between people, some historical and cultural relations, that I had not been aware of before.
And, finally, looking at all the concepts and ideas built into our societies to make room for music and fit it into the general culture sphere, has revealed how important a connection to music is and has been during times, for just about all people – even those who say that they do not know anything about music, or, indeed, claim to be tone-deaf. They do all go to parties where they dance to the music, or to concerts where they listen to music being played, or they watch movies, enjoy themselves in amusement parks, zap through the TV stations, or almost anything else they ever do in life, with music being there, affecting their emotions, filling out the empty sound spaces, creating an ambience.
In The Complete World of Music, I will try, through many individual articles, to describe some of all this. The ambition is to reach a broad and rich coverage of many aspects related to music and how it affects us all, how it’s made, who makes it, listens to it, creates the instruments, and a lot more, and how all of this takes part in shaping us as individual human beings and as societies.
The project is expected to take some time, with a new article published when I have it ready, not on planned days. And as my mind is all over the place, all over the world, most of the time, there can easily be an article about something broad, followed by another about something narrow.
I will try to avoid speaking as a commercial for the music industry, which can be a difficult task – a lot of what is happening in the world of music has a commercial aspect to it, and it can be difficult to separate the enthusiasm for the music itself from the enthusiasm for, e.g., a specific brand of instruments, strings, or other things. Mentioning a specific artist also implies making a commercial for the record company that publishes this artist, even if unmentioned, as any interest in the artist an article could spawn, will lead to earnings for that company.
But it doesn’t go without mentioning the brands and some people, some publishers, and many other commercial aspects, as this all is part of the complete world of music. My collection of stories wouldn’t be anywhere near complete without it.
Most of the focus is on the music itself, though – the parts of it all that would exist even without a music industry.
The picture is painted with a stroke of the brush here and there on the canvas, one after another, at first a bit messy, confusing, but, eventually, it will become a full picture. That’s the ambition.