JOURNAL ENTRY 5

 

REFLECTION ON MUSIC

Music is one of the most important things in my life. Whenever I feel alone, happy or depressed, I listen to some pieces of good music. It does not have to make me feel happy, nor sad. Both can happen. The topic is that: It affects my soul, greets it! That is the main thing to consider. Is it important what type of music I listen to? I think the answer to this question is definitely yes. I want to talk about the historical eras of music. The very first music genre was Classical Music which was done through very big instruments varying from violin to piano. It was produced by some great and, undoubtedly, slightly mad genius’, such as Mozart, Dvorak, Vivaldi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Chopin and Listz. In Classical Music, there were even no lyrics at all. Afterwards, Opera followed. Different from Classical Music, it had lyrics which generally stressed some issues of that time. When we look at 20th century, we can see dramatic changes in the progress of music. Different cultures met and new genres emerged. For example, in 20’s and 30’s, African people brought Jazz to United States of America. In 50’s and 60’s, new bands emerged and music went on evolving. The bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Doors dominated music industry. Within 70’s and 80’s, the history saw maybe the greatest bands and musicians ever such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Guns N’ Roses, Queen, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Cream, Def Leppard, Dio, Rainbow, Iron Maiden, Jefferson Airplane, Iron Butterfly, Jethro Tull, Judas Priest, The Who, BB King, Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens, James Brown, Frank Zappa, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper and Janis Joplin. When we look at 90’s, we can clearly see that music started to deteriorate dramatically. The most important thing in the music is the length of instrumental solos, which have always been shortening since the dawn of music history. When we look at today’s music, I can say that the music is dead. There is no guitar or drum solo! There are not even instruments! There are just machines, which is very sad!! Machines do not show a dj’s talent but an instrument does show its player’s talent! For example, I can no longer listen to a great guitar solo; I just listen to machine sound! I am really disgusted and feel like vomiting when listening to today’s music! As a conclusion, I strongly think that the music must be done through instruments, not by machines and feel sorry for those enjoy listening to machine music. I feel very lucky for I am aware of this situation and listening to the music of oldies. Even, while writing this passage at the very moment, I enjoy listening to Chopin’s Grand Valse Brillante!