Feb 01 2010
Music As Listening
I have this common statement that I make that’s actually an inside joke that I think only I get. Whenever I’m ending something, I say “Well, you know what the music means.” I’ve been given cause recently to wonder that some people might not.
I had a wonderful dinner the other evening with a friend that Jessica and I’ve met through our local community theater. We’ve been wanting to get together to chat for a while, and finally had the chance to visit them for dinner. It was a really exciting night for me because her husband is a bagpiper, and I really, really love the bagpipes. Not the Great Highland Bagpipes (The “GHB,” as they say), I love small pipes.1 That small, very ancient instrument that you can safely listen to in the intimacy of a small room and which rarely fail to touch pluck my heartstrings.
This man was a small piper, and I was really excited to finally be in the same room with this great instrument. I was even honored by being allowed to play them! For the first time in my life, I held this wonderful instrument in my hand and managed to get out the few first bars of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” before collapsing into laughter.
What bliss! It was as night filled with music and conversation, but there was one interesting conversation that the night brought on which I thought about long after the night was over. In fact, I thought about it all that night, and all the next day.
- And there are a lot of small pipes. In fact there’s a list of bagpipes that shows that they are ridiculously culturally ubiquitous in Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. [↩]
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