Music

Went for a drive with my teenage son this evening. He needs to put in time behind the wheel, and since he has acquired an iPod, and we can connect it to the car stereo, he is happy enough to do so. So we are out driving around this evening listening to a variety of tunes. I can't tell you what they are, I didn't recognize any of them. But it was interesting. A lot of the tunes seem to have a high level of background noise, like static, just this kind of medium level buzz. I am wondering what the heck it is. Could it be that our iPod to car stereo adaptor is flakey? I don't think so. They are some passages where the music is crystal clear. Could this just be high frequency sound that is somehow getting corrupted in my ears? Or is it really the way this stuff is supposed to sound? Perhaps it's in there to drive off the old people who can't stand to listen to static. And it wasn't just one band that sounded like that. I was the iPod operator and I can attest that we listened to songs from several different bands.

We drove out to Timber and got back just in time for the Glencoe Choir Concert. One my son's friend's is singing, so we go listen. It's early in the year, so they haven't had a lot of practice, but they did very well with their limited program. There were four or five different groups, some larger, some smaller, some single sex, some mixed.

Vance Sele, the choir director, explained that he was teaching them to read music so they would be musicians not just "parrots". He gave each group a piece of sheet music, previously unseen, to sing from sight. They just used the names of the notes (do, re, me) for words, and then did very well.

In preparation for one piece, the members of the choir were practicing bits of the song independently, much like you would hear an orchestra tuning up before a performance. It gave me the impression of another choir singing from backstage, kind of like the background music in a movie.