Musical anthologies
I have been recalling moments in music education. My education. Depending highly upon my peers. I admit it. The majority of what I learned, I learned from others. All instruments and technologies confused. Yes, it was. Confused, I mean. I can remember my first introduction to recording. From a lad two streets over who wanted to sell me his reel to reel tape recorder. He made it sound absolutely wonderful. With a razor blade and a lot of time I could make a recording from the sounds around me. Forget the fact that I was not old enough to shave and the razor blades were in some ways dangerous. The deal fell through because I did not have enough money on hand. And then we moved and in my new neighbourhood I learned that others collected music. For the main part in LP format. Someone next door who loaned me my first Led Zeppelin album. Someone else, three doors down, who introduced me to traditional blues. I doubt that he knew that, because we could only access his record collection when he was not at home. Others in my class had different artists’ LPs. We lived in a world of musical anthologies. There were bargain basement LPs that contained 20 or 30 songs from the hit parade. When we met people in our class that actually could afford to buy real records from one band at a time, it was an eye opener. Or ear opener if you will. By the time I made it to college I had people in my residence that not only had good budgets but eclectic musical tastes. I was able to profit from the open door policy. You know, where they would leave their door open in the evening while they played what they wanted to listen to and the rest of us soaked it up. For all you modern people that depend on playlists from the Internet I doubt that you ever will have the kind of variety that we had on a daily basis. I know that it gave me a broad taste in music. Something that I managed to play into a personal collection of recorded cassettes. I was a mellow man with a very limited budget. I have, as life continued, managed to get rid of most of the media, but not the memories. It often takes only one or two notes to bring back memories of moments from so long ago. Going forward I will continue to discover but I doubt that I will ever have as broad a range of content as I did back in the days of high school and college.
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