okie so i've been singing classical music for a number of years now and while i can sightread stuff and add expression to it and that's all fine whenever a music teacher asks me about stuff relating to the composers or any of their history usually i can't answer because i don't know jack shit about history currently. i need to fix this shit immediately so i can have "proper nuanced conversations" with fellow musos without looking like a bellend.
gameplan: i should start with researching and filling out my knowledge gaps in music i'm already performing so i can actually talk about it. my finger is already in quite a few musical pies and the musicians that bake these pies don't talk to each other much so in essence i will be striving to become the avatarman of genres. it's kinda like being a biochemist in a sense where you have to understand the basics of stuff like quantum electron fields in physics, stats and mechanics, chem stuff (it is mostly just organic chem tbf) and veterinary/human biology just to be able to make sense of questions seemingly unrelated to any of these (i expect it's similar with most degrees though). following this to its logical conclusion, i will be able to properly explain the importance of medieval church polyphony to a raver off his nut on molly listening to rainbow kicks, or similarly how wobbly bassline synths have applicable relevance to vocal formants and IPA vowel formation to a 79 year old wiccan villager.
i've never been super invested in the contextual roots of culture before but i'd like to change that. the real payoff here is that it will make ytpmvs funnier if i can begin to grasp the fact that millennia of culture have culminated in the execution of a single vine boom, or appreciating the actions of a single moravian man stretching fish skin over a hollow log butterflied into a sick nasty howling st. anger snare nuke in a peelingflesh breakdown.
i'd really like this to be one of those moments where i stay consistent in researching stuff rather than getting excited about the idea of researching then forgetting about it (maybe tuv was right about the whole adhd thing i dunno undiagnosed but its possible)
i shall therefore be adding these books to my reading list (i'm using lmarena to generate me lists of books because it's faster than using fucking reddit and probably more insightful than that armenian cybersec drivel):
"The Oxford History of Western Music" by Richard Taruskin
"The Art of the Song: A History of the Lied" by Richard Stokes
"The English Art-Song: A Study in Musical Style" by David Fanning
"French Mélodie: The Song of France" by Michael Dervan
"Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture" by Deena Weinstein
"The History of Jazz" by Ted Gioia
"The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire" by David Hajdu
"Rave On: The Rise of Electronic Dance Music" by Mark Fisher
"EDM: The Rise of Electronic Dance Music" by Dan LeRoy
"Jungle: The Story of a Genre" by David Toop
"Music in the Arab World" by Helga de la Motte-Haber
"Music in West Africa" – Steven Feld
"Andalusian Music in the Maghreb" by Régis Blanchot
"The Mexican Revolution in Song and Poetry" by Michael J. Gonzales
"Flamenco: A Guide to the Traditional Music and Dance of Southern Spain" – Ian Mason
"The Tango Machine: Music, Performance, and Identity in Argentina" by Daniel J. Cohen
"The Music of the Caribbean: A Historical Survey"" by Richard B. Allen
"Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice" – Brian Kane
"K-Pop: A Cultural History" by Kyung Hyun Kim
surely i will read at least some of these i mean i've gotta read at least some of the western stuff for my diploma...