tapevulture Thanks so much! I’m very glad you are enjoying my write-ups. It’s been a good way to share progress and thoughts beyond just the completed work.
Yes, I played trumpet. I played a ton of music through school and did do jazz bands though I never felt like I got “good” at it. My formal training is primarily classical - my private teachers were symphonic trumpet players and I mostly played in youth symphonies, though I had more fun in pep bands and playing in the school’s musicals.
It’s fascinating that you hear an improvisational sound in my pieces. I that’s absolutely how I tend to compose them, though I wouldn’t have described it that way.
I have some opinions about how music is taught to kids that I’m trying to intentionally avoid with my kids. Many years ago, there was this book called “Tiger Mom” that was making the rounds in social media and one thing about it in the discussion was how this person’s kids were expected to play music (so they can get into college and move upwards socially), and thus you either played Piano or Violin. Absolutely not guitar.
I remember reading some thoughts about this from a musician and how this was all wrapped up in the cultural baggage of how classical music is “hard” and “non-popular” and thus “culturally valuable”. Unlike rock or jazz or rap or reggae or any music that a kid might actually seek out and enjoy.
Now that I’m teaching my kids piano, I’m trying to make sure they get to pick what they play.
I don’t listen to classical music as a genre, though I appreciate what I learned from it and do like specific works. I think that our exposure to classical music is mostly through the framework of learning to play it in orchestra, and we learn to play those pieces instead of modern orchestral scores (music and games shoot to the top of my mind) because classical music is out of copyright. So again, it’s a stupid rights issue for art instead of a discussion of art on its merits.
