Being a Musician

I can't help it that I am a musician.  I can't help it that I am from the old school.  I don't feel old.  I wish I did.  They say you never really become an adult until your parents are gone.  My reality is at age fifty-two, I have been around long enough to have become extinct.  I'm sure in other places my profession carries on.  I am sure of it, because I have Facebook friends who are musicians.  I moved from Fayetteville, North Carolina to Columbus, Ohio to work on my doctorate of musical arts in composition.  I nearly finished had it not been for the eye disease kerataconus.  I needed cornea transplants in each eye, and I am grateful to be able to see.  My eyes are not what they used to be.  It seems in a college town music always is more active.  I was able to make a living in Columbus playing keyboards for several years.  I was an accomplished jazz pianist, but it is difficult to remember.  Now I am extremely isolated from music.  What I hear on television is most insulting.  I go on about this from time to time.  I'm not sure if I grew up in the golden age of television, but I must have.  I am lucky as the child of baby boomers that my cultural proclivities far are superior compared to the youth of today.  America drastically has changed during the last decade, and it has been for the worst.  I use television as an example, because in its golden age it was artistic.  It set an example for healthy behavior.  Today it is intended to dumb down the population.  Not only have we neglected our system of public education, we are bombarding our viewing citizens with trash.  As a musician I can't help to make value judgements about the quality of music around me.  Television music in particular has suffered the most.  Once it was the pinnacle for aspiring commercial composers.  Today it is an afterthought.  Like America's pop music it does nothing.  It does not inspire, it does not create art, and ironically is does not qualify as being music.  It, like the rest of reality television, fills space. It passes time.  It accomplishes nothing except for making Americans more ignorant.  We are bombarded with trash ruthlessly and without conscience.  Whether it is a conscious decision or the result of a suffering economy, television music is extinct.  What is taking its place is something that is not music.  It is noise.  It is constant droning noise that fills time and space.  Noise creates insensitivity.  We tune it out.  I have found since being back in Fayetteville, North Carlina all of my musical skills have faded because they are not being used.  Also they are not being reinforced.  Rarely if ever do I hear any music on television that qualifies as music.  Music is time organized in rhythm.  Rhythm is what is conspicuously absent from both television and pop music today.  Instead what is used is the lazy and usually drunken motion of a strumming guitarist.  It takes no musical knowledge to strum a guitar, and that motion of ignorance in a clever coup has defeated real music and taken its place.  This ignorance in music I have come to realize is the partner in crime to ignorant reality television.  Music had to be dumbed down or it would upstage the non actors.  When I am blessed to be able to watch and listen to a music video from its golden years, I am shocked by the quality of its sound.  Even when bands are performing live in large arenas surrounded by noisy fans, the pure audio quality  coming from the stage is amazing.  Often I have to do a double take to see if I really am hearing a live performance.  If these vintage videos or any of the Top 100 from history's Billboard charts were to be heard today, it would cement that reality that today's pop music is indeed not real music.  Systematically this is why quality television programming, quality radio music, and music television are buried.  The music industry that is in power today in America wants it that way, because they would not be in power if that comparison ever emerged.  After watching Superbowl number forty-nine this evening, I found all of the terrible shortcomings of cheap film music have made their way onto television.  They really are the same, and that was an infuriating realization.  I have wanted to write film music almost my entire life, and this is what I have to listen to?  I understand I do not have to listen to it, but why must I at age fifty-two give up the entertaining things I have had my entire life?  Is it a right of passage?  Is God trying to tell me something?  I think this is possible.  I have tried feverishly to maintain my professional keyboard rig for the last two years.  It has been difficult.  Only last night after I have programmed its patches three separate times all of this work was lost in what must have been one blast of static electricity.  All of the programs that call up my quality chosen sounds mysteriously vanished.  Instead I got a ROM chip validation that the system was good, and each and every patch that had been named were now INIT.  INIT.  The memory had been initialized.  After scanning the manual for this unit I could find no such parameter in its menus.  Synthesizers of course have this function.  It was unnerving.  Because I know I can re-program the controlling patches, I didn't get angry.  I was dismayed.  Three separate times all ready I have done this trying to keep this rig operational.  The first time the patches were lost by a technician changing its battery.  The second time, lightening struck.  This is the third time.  Because the music industry today is so different than before, the piece of gear I am using to control my rig no longer is manufactured.  They would rather sell you expensive computer gear that does not sound as good.  I am from the old school, and old school is better.  I do not want to carry a laptop computer with me to a gig.  It is expensive, it is a theft temptation, and it is not musical.  I had to take this piece of gear apart and try to find some anomaly.  It seems the battery holder was a little loose, so I bent it with some long-nosed pliers.  I have no way of knowing if this will happen again.  It takes many long hours choosing sounds, setting up MIDI routings, programming patch changes, and naming settings.  I should be good at it by now.  Because I am so disillusioned with music today, I am beginning to think that it is time to draw the chapter of electronic music in my life to a close.  I have over  four hours of contemporary classical piano music that needs publishing.  Why am I wasting my time on this keyboard gear?  The answer is it gives me immense pleasure.  The sounds I create exponentially are better than any sounds you hear today.  The sounds (sound) you hear today completely is hackneyed.  It is a hack.  I'm not sure today if our ignorant youth would even understand what a hack is.  A fake.  They are too worried about being homosexual and mediocre, and it has become the entertainment industry's job to stroke their egos with dribble.  I have little pleasure in my life today.  One major thing that has kept me happy for several years is seen as an enemy today.  Republican businessmen can't make money on skateboarding.  It like art is an uplifting and enlightening sport.  We can't have that, seeing as the sole responsibility of adolescent TV is to be ignorant.  Skateboarding.  Skateboarding creates physical pleasure by allowing the rider to defy gravity.  In Fayetteville, North Carolina our gravity no longer is a virgin.  Our gravity while strong enough to keep our feet on the ground does not seems as strong as the infrasonic waves that beat us everyday.  They are so strong here from air and rail traffic that they can move objects.  This barometric air pressure makes it nearly impossible to surf a wave the traditional way.  It creates its own never-ending wave that like bad television and pop music seizes power over what was good.  America has become overrun with this movement and we are dying as a result of it.  Terrorism in America does not have to be violent.  Slowly and without recognition it is killing our citizens with ease in our own homes.  How can I qualify the ignorance of this non-music?  It is simple.  The motion it uses as a substitute for rhythm is that of a mindless drunken stooge.  It requires no thought.  How is it possible to have music with no thought?  It is because it is not music.  It is noise.