Paul Wehage
|
12/5/2006 7:13:30 AM
Being an American Musician....
Living abroad, you start to think a lot about what it means to be an American musician and what American music is. I spent years playing "American music" concerts around Europe and it's pretty amazing how many different images that phrase has to people in different places, so much of which is concerned with whatever the studios are trying to push. So much of this has nothing to do with the whole idea of music, but rather of commercial aspects.
So, what IS American music? How do we define our culture? I went to a concert last night, which I'll write about in a bit, in honor of a friend's father, who is probably the most important living composer in Dagestan (It's on the Caspian Sea, just to the South of the mouth of the Volga river, in the North of the Caucassian mountains). What struck me about this concert was that there was a real sense of knowing who this person was through his musical expression, and the musical expression adding another layer of meaning to the whole idea of identity.
Does this have any meaning in the idea of "American Culture"? I don't know the answer to that, but I think about this a lot, lately....
|
|