No Music For You

After spending an entire day preparing slow-cooked tomato sauce, I had to sit down.  The pressure/slow cooker is an indispensable cooking tool.  It can keep your sauce warm an entire day, sealed, and mostly immune from the growing of harmful bacteria.  After I make a tomato sauce beginning at eleven in the evening the day before, I am ready to move on to other foods.  It was delicious spaghetti, better than most restaurants.  It was a good thing, but I am glad to be done with the cooking.  I would rather think and write something, not that many people are reading my blog these days.  Working abroad on cruise ships for twelve years spoiled me.  ?  I didn't know that was possible.  Being a ship orchestra pianist was the hardest task I ever accomplished next to graduation from UNC-Chapel Hill.  I had to look in the program on graduation day to make sure my name was there.  I almost failed Sightsinging ll.  In fact I did with a 59, but my professor, the first woman to graduate Yale with a music degree knew I had done my work.  I just didn't see the point in using syllables to sing intervals.  I had twelve years of piano lessons beginning in first grade.  I understood music and harmony.  I learned my intervals in Music Theory 101.  I could sing them.  What I couldn't do is remember a syllable name.  I knew the interval and how to sing it.  What good was trying to remember a perfect fifth was the syllable "sol?"  It was extraneous information, at least for me.  For others the syllables could be necessary as a way to teach the sound of the intervals.  She understood this, and I aced the piano proficiency test.  Harmonize a simple chorale melody and then transpose it to a different key.  These are thing pianists do, especially when one is trying to learn to improvise in jazz style.  The orchestra job on the cruise ship may be one of the most difficult, although most will scoff.  The way I became successful at it was using my academic composition background.  I analyzed shows, especially the piano music.  It was necessary, because the copywork or notation of ship piano music must be the worst in existence.  The arrangers of the production shows are required to provide recorded tracks.  This is their primary focus, producing these tracks.  Printed music for live ship musicians is an afterthough, and it was obvious.  Often times they would transpose an entire number for a production singer, and the resulting enharmonic spellings of accidentals was a travesty not to mention the fingerings on piano.  I struggled to play these arrangements finally realizing they had been transposed from a more accessible key.  It explained the awkward fingerings.  Anyway, this job was the most challenging of my life.  Because I was devoted to it, and because I did not have other responsibilities I could manage it.  The ship crew mess provides your meals.  Hotel provides your quarters.  While you do have to clean and pick up linens, it allows you time to specialize in your job.  I was a full-time musician, and I enjoyed it.  Now I am a home-owner.  Wow!  Who knew life in America could be so challenging.  Yard work, lots of it.  Constant yard work.  Cooking, everyday.  Chores.  Repairs.  Solving ongoing problems.  The problem is America no longer is helping Americans.  Instead we have to fight the machine.  Life is difficult and challenging, and we are receiving little help from government.  In fact local and federal government are exploiting Americans.  Not only are we being shafted from things we deserve, such as a quality public education, there are no jobs, especially in Southeastern North Carolina.  The music industry is a pale shadow of its former glory.  It makes me realize how America has shrunk in importance.  We no longer champion the American Dream.  In a certain sense we are free to roam, but the economic opportunities once America afforded us are gone.  The music industry is a perfect metaphor.  Throughout America's history, music has played an important role in American culture.  Always it has been intertwined with Americans' lives.  No more.  Music has been deemed unimportant, simply because it is more powerful than a room full of CEO's.  It is more powerful than a room full of board members.  While CEO's and board members today have more power than ever before in America, they control the world with money, not culture.  They have eliminated culture and thus the soul of America to control the world with money.  What is important to America today?  It is a simple question.  What is important to America today?  Music?  Entertainment?  Hollywood?  Movies?  All of it is floundering, because mass industry is what is important and only to those who own it.  The rest of us attempt to survive in its refuse.  We live the ruins of the military industrial complex.  Carolina beaches are training grounds for war.  War is scattered up and down the eastern seaboard.  Navy stations in Charleston and Norfolk, in Florida and the elsewhere.  Should common middleclass Americans have to worry about war?  There have been times in America where we were not fighting for survival.  There have been times of prosperity.  This is not a time of prosperity.  This is the modern American Dark Ages.  Art and culture are at a historical low point, and only small disparate groups are keeping it alive.  I applaud those doing this.  For those of us that are artists and musicians, our prospects are bleak.  There is no money to be made unless you sing new pop country.  The music licensing system has failed, and musicians once who were able to make a living are struggling.  Music has been deemed unimportant to America.