My Music Notebooks: An Overview

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

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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.

Electronic Music .

Classical Guitar. 

Hi Ron:

Interesting... I'm about 10 years younger than you, spent my whole life playing music.. Just do it now for my own enjoyment and learning..  My first 45 was "Goodbye to Toyland", by Annette Funicello (of Mickey ouse Club)..  Our band played the Barry Mcguire song.  It's strange at this age to listen to music, especially cable commercials, and know where they ripped off the chords, or the idea, or part of the motif.. 

I studied Hammond Organ and learned from fake books from the 30's to the 60's..  So I know a lot of songs, people my age, wouldn't normally know..  Music still amazes, and gives me comfort and purpose.. look forward to hearing some of your experiences or ideas you have on music..  It is so many different things to different people..  I worked in recording studios for most of my life.. And each good musician I met, brought a different process or outlook on how they created music..  I learn't a lot that way.  I'm sure you have valuable insight to share with all of us..

Mark Styles