RonPrice

The following two paragraphs serve as the introduction to the music sub-section of my website.-Ron ------------------- Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch which governs melody and harmony, rhythm and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from a Greek word which, when translated, means "art of the Muses." Although this sub-section of my website is part of popular culture, I deal on this webpage with music in its totality: all forms, all cultures and the history of music. The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music all vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions, and their recreation in performance, through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. It may also be divided among art music and folk music. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics. Music may be played and heard live, may be part of a dramatic work or film, or may be recorded. This page of my website is not only about the music of popular culture, but it is also about the total field of music. For more of this introduction to music go to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music You can also go to my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/Music.html

I was not sure just where to post this item; I'll place it in this sub-section for starters and, as I do, I'll wish everyone well as we head through 2015.-Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MY MEMOIRS: PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS SECTION IX: NOTEBOOKS MUSIC INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC NOTEBOOKS 1.1 Classical Music 1.2 Classical Music 1.1.A Popular: Folk/Rock Music 1.1.B Jazz Music Part 1: Music has played an important part in my life unlike dance which has been, at best, a peripheral experience. In primary school from 1950 to 1957 music was a regular part of the curriculum. My mother and father both played the piano, sang in choirs, had singalongs in our home, with our family, with friends and with the Baha’i community as I entered my late childhood in about 1953/4. We listened to classical music around the house from my birth in 1944 until my father died in 1965. Then my mother and I moved into different houses. I moved to another town and then another and then another country; in the process this family musical experience ended. In the mid-to-late fifties I became interested in rock and roll, listened to it on the radio in my bedroom among other places and in 1965 I bought my first LP: Barry McGuire’s ‘The Eve of Destruction.’ My mother gave me the family copy of The Messiah that same year and these two LPs launched my collection. I purchased LPs and 45s, as they were known, until 1975 by which time I had accumulated some 60 LPs and 45s. In 1975 my first marriage ended and with it, it seems in retrospect, my purchase of records and extensive listening to music in my home. Judy, my first wife, and I never had a TV and listening to records was an important part of our shared experience. In the following years I had to scale-back my purchases of records due to having to raise three children and the increased cost of records. My second wife and her two daughters were more interested in watching TV, engaging in sport and, for various reasons like the fracturing and diversity of our musical tastes and the birth of my only child, listening to records in my home seriously diminished by the mid-1970s. Part 2: I started to learn to play the guitar in 1968 after an unsuccessful attempt at classical guitar in 1962/3. I taught music in my role as a primary teacher from 1967 to 1971. In 1989 I taught guitar to a class of Aboriginal students at Thornlie Tafe. I led sing-alongs from 1968 to 1999 when I retired from the teaching profession. In 2000 I joined a small group of singers in George Town to entertain residents in an aged care facility called Ainslie House in that same town, the oldest town in Australia(1804) and I continued singing with that group until May of 2005. In 2008 I began to play the guitar and to lead those same residents in singalongs using my “sixties singalong music booklet” that I revised from earlier collections I had made as far back as the 1960s. In 2000 I also had access to some 50 CDs as part of my role of Baha’i radio program presenter on City Park Radio. By April 2005 I had presented about 150 half hour programs and this activity also came to an end that year. Such, in summary, is a brief history of my musical experience. I have made a list of the pieces of music I have enjoyed most and it can be found in my computer directory, my two-ring binder sing-along file and on the internet. I also have a list of all the records I own in that same file. This particular music file has four sub-sections divided as outlined at the start of this introduction: 2 popular music sections and two classical sections. They contain separate lists of articles about music, articles I began to save in 1984, but did not begin to save seriously until the year 2000. I opened this file for these articles and resources in 2004 after twenty years of slowly accumulating the material. It has become a serious collection in the last four years(2004-2008) in my effort to write poetry with musical themes. In 2005 I divided the resources into: (a) classical and (b) popular and placed them in separate files. In 2006 I opened a jazz section(1.1.B), a sub-section of the popular music file. I should mention, in closing this introduction, that radio and television have played an important part in my musical experience beginning as far back as 1944. This is not the place to summarize more than 60 years of radio and more than 35 years of television and their respective musical influences. I should say, though, that in these first nine years of my retirement, 1999 to 2008, my musical experience comes in the main from the Australian Radio National FM classical radio station; of course TV and some pop-music from the local radio station are also part of my musical fare. Occasionally I used to get an LP bug and listen to classical music from my collection of LPs, but in 2007 this ceased due to hi-fi technical problems. One of my aims in these early years of my retirement is to integrate music, life's activities and my religious beliefs in different ways in my poetry and in postings on the internet. The resources in these files represent a base of information for this poetic-writing exercise which I have found to be immensely stimulating. Ron Price 18/6/'07 to 16/1/'15.

JOAN BAEZ AND ME More than three years ago a film was released on the life of Joan Baez(1941- ). How Sweet the Sound came to television today in Tasmania.1 Baez rose to fame in 1959 when I was 15, and she only 19. I was a person of fame, too, but only in a little town in Ontario, and nowhere else. Her first major performance was at the Newport Folk Festival, the same year I joined the Baha’i Faith. Baez was a Quaker and a pacifist. I am not a pacifist and our forms of social activism are very different. I have always loved her singing from her first albums which appeared in 1960, 1961, and 1962 when I was finishing high school. In 1962, when I began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha’i community, Baez had just begun her 2 year romance with Bob Dylan. I had no idea at the time immersed as I was in nine grade 13 subjects with their necessary four hours per night homework. The year 1962 also saw my final baseball and ice-hockey seasons with the Burlington all-stars and in the juvenile league. I was involved in a new Baha’i community, and was kept busy emotionally in keeping a lid on my libido.-Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC1 TV, 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., 7/4/’13. We have a lot in common, Joan, you and I, as we head into that final decade of late adulthood.1 We have an autobiographical bias to our writing……In 1987 you said: “I was made to live alone.”2 As the years went on I felt, increasingly, the same. We both had a public life for half a century…..and you are still going, Joan, while I have retired into a writing life and little public activity……few of endless meetings, wall-to-wall people, and none of the social protest-popularity profile: and you will go down in history. I wish you well, Joan, as evening continues to the last syllable of our recorded time on this plain, and we go into a hole for those who sing and speak no more. What say you, Joan, of the life beyond, & that Undiscovered Country from which no one ever returns to tell of the story beyond? 1 Baez is 72 and I am 69. Some developmental psychologists call the years from 70 to 80, the last decade of late adulthood. 2 Baez’s second autobiography was entitled: And a Voice to Sing With. Mine is entitled Pioneering Over Five Epochs. Ron Price 7/4/’13 to 18/7/'13.

Watching the SBS1 TV doco1 on Franco Zeffirelli yesterday made me think about the comparisons and contrasts between the life of a writer, a composer, and that of a producer and director. Of course, I became especially interested in how his creative activity was similar or different from mine. Each writer, each producer and director, each music composer has a different story, a different way to look at their creativity and the creative process. Zeffirelli will soon be 90 and I will soon be 70; he was an entre deux guerres baby and I was a war baby; he has achieved fame and wealth; I am an unknown, financially comfortable but far from wealthy. My wife would call us poor. -Ron Price with thanks to 1”Franco Zeffirelli,” SBS1, 2:30-3:30 p.m., 5 February 2011. Comparisons are odious,1 but inevitable in life, and more inevitable for some of us as we journey life’s path….Your mother died when you were 6 & mine when I was 33; you went for the theatre in your 20s and I went for university & a teaching career……..You went for Catholicism and I went for the Baha’i Faith!* Homosexuality seemed to be in your bones while the heat of sex turned me into heterosexuality—and both of us kept our sexual-style all our lives…By the 1990s and 2000s you were getting knighted and receiving so many honours and I was retiring from decades of work as a teacher…..... I wish you well, Franco, in your remaining years on the mortal coil that remain with Jesus in the very depths of your spirit as Baha’u’llah is in mine: two men, one spirit.2 1 Comparisons are odious, Proverbs 141; comparisons are odorous, Much Ado About Nothing, act 3, sc. 5; Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394-1476), comparisons are odious. De Laudibus Leg. Angliæ. Chap. xix. 2 Franco Zeffirelli, Wikipedia, 6 February 2011 Ron Price 6 February 2011 Updated for: Young Composers Music Forum on: 19/4/'12