Musicology
Spent the day yesterday doing something I could easily do every day. Read a book and listened to music. But not just any music. I started going through the box of vinyl I bought for $10 at a garage sale. It’s 90% classical. And when those long pieces start unwinding, I start unwinding, as the complexity envelopes me and I try to listen, really listen to the movements and the melodies and the counter melodies. But sometimes my mind slips away and I lose track of where I am, and sometimes that’s the point, to let the music carry you away.
These are relatively old recordings dating back to the early 1950s when electronic recording was just coming into vogue. One of the RCA records boasts of being a “New Orthophonic” High Fidelity Record. Lovely sound. Leopold Stokowski directing Schönberg’s Transfigured Night along with selections from Prokofieff’s Romeo and Juliet. I was unfamiliar with them going in, I’m more familiar now because on the back of the jacket there are liner notes. They’re gone now with the digital wind. I’m pretty sure we’ve lost something real.
But I think I’m going to have a long and happy relationship with these records. Listening, reading the notes, learning about the music, and I’ll learn something about the previous owner, too, because there are three or four versions of Schubert’s, The Trout, along with four albums featuring music from the bands of Amory High School in Meridian Mississippi. Sounds like a musical family to me. Just my sort of people.