Making Our Musical Choices

IF YOU LIVE IN A COLLEGE TOWN, you might notice that there's a song writer-guitar player-singer on every street corner, in every bar, and that they're all very good. Acoustic guitar is the instrument of choice, among the greatest of many gifts of Spanish culture. Piano and violin are close behind. String and percussion instruments are easier to learn and play well, and more accessible to virtuosity than brass and woodwind. Pete Fountain and Louis Armstrong are far more rare than Horowitz, HendriX, and Roy Clark. No matter how good a trumpet or French horn player is, world class people hit sour notes, and never know, from day to day, what will come out right, and what will come out wrong. On guitar, piano, or percussion, perfection is achievable. So, American culture is suffused with the delightful strummings and poundings of strings, while the double reed and brass folks adhere quietly in the background, until they arrive at their cues, and bleat out loud, rich pensive bell ringings. Without strings there is no music, the brass and the woodwinds round out the band, equally indispensable if not up front. There was a time when a person could make a living as a musician. There was a time when not only did the winners of the great American pop top forty popularity lottery make trillions, but so did the second level get by fairly well. No more. Now, its either riches or rags. Taylor Swift does fine, as do a relative handful of elite lucky others, but the guy on the street corner no longer has a chance. The internet gives us music for free, and welcome to the modern world. Its boom or bust, but guess what? The free market is a fact of life, albeit a grossly unfair and imperfect one. If you want to be a successful songwriter guitar player singer in this man's do or die world, you have to perform live, out there on the stage, town to town at first, bar to bar, and like Neil Diamond, who struggled mightily at first once said, "the stage is the god damnedest woman I've ever known." The recording studio alone will no longer suffice. So take what you get. You chose to be an acoustic guitar picker, and you gave up the trumpet in grade school. The best singers are on the opera stage, and they are not named Taylor Swift. Taylor squeaks, pants and grimaces her way all the way to the bank in a culture where mediocrity often passes for real talent, and the perfect, rich voice of Beverly Sills is heard by the mere handful of operatic aficionados who inhabit the ornate museums of yesterday's art forms. But again, we all make our choices.......... PLEASE SHARE THIS WEBSITE WITH OTHERS. REVOLUTIONARIES NEED LOVE TOO!.