Welcome to the World!

Welcome to Diverse Cultures and their Musics! My Blog for this class will serve a few different functions. I’ll be elaborating on the Blog topics assigned in your Course Schedule, so that you have a more thorough idea of what I’m expecting of you. It will also serve as a hub for you us to all access your class blogs. It will be a place for you to leave evidence that you commented on your classmates’ blogs. And who knows? We might find a few more uses along the way.

A few ground rules to get us off and running. All your Blog entries must be in grammatically correct Standard English. Capitalize your “I”s and spell out Y-O-U. They don’t charge by the letter here, and tweets aren’t going to cut it. You might want to consider actually typing out your blog entries in Word, checking through it all, and then pasting your text into your blog. As you type, please remember that blogs are available for everyone to see—classmates, professors, grandmothers, mentors, potential dates, and potential employers—and you should conduct your typing accordingly. All Entries and Comments are due by 11:59 pm on the days they are assigned. (You can work ahead to a certain extent on some of the topics, but don’t attempt to post until I’ve written about it here on my own blog so that you’ll know more of what I’m looking for.)

First: Build you blog TODAY. It needn’t be beautiful and interesting and polished (you can polish it as you create your first post), but it does need to exist. You can use any blog site that you like, but it must allow for public comments on each post you’ll make and it must be public. I recommend sticking with Blogger--you already have a Google account, courtesy of your Converse email address, and so the process is pretty seamless. (Wordpress is lovely as well, but it's a bit more complex.) Once you have a web address for your blog, post your full name and your Blog address (i.e. Kelly Vaneman,  kmvanemandcm2020.blogspot.com) as a comment on this blog post by 11:59 pm TODAY—that’s Monday, January 6. (That way, if you’re having problems, we can deal with them pronto.) I’ll post links to everyone’s blog on my blog so that you can access each other’s blogs easily. (Once we get started, you might find it easier to post the class’s blog addresses on your own blogs.)

Next: Your first actual blog post is to type out your Global Music Autobiography. Though you may not be aware of it, you’ve all experienced music outside of your immediate self-identified culture. What I want to know is what some of those cultures and experiences are. Perhaps your grandmother used to sing you songs from her native Ireland, or your third grade class visited a Cherokee reservation. Does your roommate dig all things Bollywood? Or do you really love the background music at the sushi restaurant? Think, think, think, and then type it all up. Goal: 400-500 words by 11:59 pm on the second day of class, Tuesday, January 7, please.

I’ll post more information about your next blog topic soon. In the meantime, just to get you started, here’s my own Global Music Autobiography. You’ll notice that I’ve made use of a variety of extended media. The existence of such things has truly transformed the world of ethnomusicology, and thus I’d encourage you to embed a variety of media into your own posts whenever possible.

Ahem:

My Global Music Autobiography

I’m just a bit older than most of you, and I’ve managed to have many, many run-ins with music outside of my own culture. I grew up in West Texas, and my hometown of San Angelo had a sizable Mexican-American population, so we heard a lot of Mariachi music growing up. In fact, several years ago I was having dinner with my parents in a Mexican Food restaurant in Helen, Georgia (truly a deeply weird town if there ever was one—go check it out, if you haven’t already) when a Mariachi band started to play for the diners. They came over to our table and my mom asked them to play a specific tune, since it was my grandfather’s favorite—up until that moment, I had no idea he had liked that sort of music.

Prior to coming to Converse, I spent a year in New York city immersed in two very different types of music. During the day, I worked at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which exposed me to a wide variety of music, as groups from all over the world came to visit and perform. In the evenings I performed with the lo-fi Ashley Wilkes Band, which involved adapting my oboe-ing to the rock scene. We even played CBGBs a couple of times!

Moving to Spartanburg made me a bit nervous, as it seemed so far away from any sort of cultural hub. Over time, though, I’ve been amazed at how our Hub City has brought in all sorts of performers from other cultures. We’ve had musicians from India, Japan, China, and Nepal perform at Converse, and the Chapman Cultural Center has hosted both a group of Tibetan Monks and a Native American Pow-wow. And every fall Spartanburg hosts the International Festival, which features cultures from all over the globe.

Probably the neatest interaction I’ve had with a different musical culture, though, was the week I spent a few years ago in Amman, Jordan. My flutist husband and I had been invited to come perform and teach for a week at the Royal Jordan Conservatory. Our hosts were friends with another musical couple–-Tareq plays the Arabic Oud and the cello, and his wife Ala’a plays flute. We traded music lessons, so while my husband gave Ala’a a flute lesson I got an Arabic theory lesson with Tareq, complete with demonstrations on his Oud. Afterwards, our friends took us around the Conservatory, where we were introduced to a number of Arabic musicians and their instruments—the fellow playing the Qanun was especially amazing. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have my work as a musician take me to many different countries, where I’ve gotten to experience music in a huge variety of settings and styles. A couple of  years ago, though, I got to have one of the coolest musical experiences of my life right here at home. Converse Theatre, under the direction of Professor Meg Hanna-Tominaga, recreated a Japanese Bunraku Puppet theater play as a 1940s Film Noir production, and she asked me to provide music on my oboe. How surprised was I to discover that we were working on the same play that I’ve shown in this class many times! We have a VHS tape on Bunraku in the library, and “Love Suicides” is the sample production. I even recognized the puppets Professor H-T had sent over as examples.

One of the most amazing aspects of being a professional musician is that, if you play your cards right, your music will take you to all sorts of amazing places and cultures, where you inevitably meet wonderful people and the music they make. I can’t wait to find out what my next adventure will be