Brad Mehldau – piano
Larry Grenadier – bass
Jorge Rossy – drums
For some reason Blogger's not letting me post Youtubes directly again. This is the kind of week I've been having. I always feel kind of nostalgic about my school years around this time, which is odd because I generally hated school. I won't tell you how many years it is, sometime early in September, that I performed for the first time in college, I'm a lot older than my advisor and my piano teachers were then.
But that's enough of that. I recently took an old Raspberry Pi Zero I bought five years ago as a back up and stuck an old Raspbian imaged SD card in it and found the Sonic Pi program for composing electronic music. I hadn't much tried Raspbian though I'm using the newer Raspberry Pi OS in the 400 I recently bought expecting this fifteen year old junker I've been using since shortly after I started blogging is about to conk out, completely.
I think I'd taken a look at Sonic Pi quite a while back, heard the samples of pop music and figured it wasn't anything I needed to learn. Was that ever a stupid mistake. I've been looking into it and can say, without any reservation that this free program, on a micro-SD card about the size of one of my smaller fingernails, on a five dollar computer (it would set you back a whopping ten dollars, these days) can do more than must about all of the stuff that was in the electronic music lab I worked in back then. No, it can actually do a lot more, a lot more precisely and a lot easier and you'll probably have a better sounding and more interesting recording at the end of it.
I gave someone the tape of my creations from back then, I doubt he kept them so they're lost to the world - probably just as well. But if I had the resources available today, for free, this program, the MuseScore music printing program, even just the basic level of word processing, not to mention the enormous catalogues of scores available from sites like IMSLP, and the enormously better access to scholarship than we ever got even with the best of inter-library loans, I'd have made a lot more progress than I did. Though the world in general would probably have been as indifferent as it proved to be. Not that I'd give up having done music, I just wish I'd done it in a more wise way.
I hope beginning music students have some small amount of appreciation as to how much more they have to learn from than we did.
That said, don't make the mistake I did, major in Music Education because you will need a job and NO ONE IS GOING TO WANT TO PAY YOU TO DO MUCH OTHER THAN TEACHING. One of the reasons for that is I was an out-of-the closet gay man when that was still a major professional liability, especially in teaching. Another was I had the stupid idea that I wanted to teach on the university level, before I realized how unhappy most of the college teachers I knew were. I rented from a couple of them, they weren't Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf bad but they drank way too much.
I hope music majors now and into the future will have jobs with a decent income, good insurance, dental, especially, and the possibility of some security. I wish you well, I wish you dental health. Don't drink, it's more dangerous than you think.
Be careful of Ibuprofen, it's way more dangerous than you think, too. It should never have been released for over-the-counter sale.
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