so a few months ago I was getting to
know a brand new boy student she’s a
nine year old girl and I was asking her
the typical questions that I asked new
students like what’s your favorite color
what’s your favorite animal what kind of
music do you like
she told me that her favorite color is
purple and her favorite animal is dogs
which I approved of so it was fine we
knew that we’d have a decent
teacher-student relationship and then
she surprised me by saying that not
talking about her favorite artist or her
favorite style of music but by telling
me that she’s really interested in music
history well she told me that after
probing a little bit further that she
has heard of both Beethoven and Michael
Jackson
so music history to her is moonlight
sonata and thriller and I thought that
that was kind of charming but I I wasn’t
exactly sure why these particular
artists were the two that liked that she
thought of immediately so after I gave
her kind of a brief overview of his of
the history of western music I was
telling her about the medieval era and
the Baroque and everything I started to
think about how we got to this point and
why these are the two that she thought
of now we typically define music by
genre we are human and we like to
categorize so there’s classical there’s
jazz there’s contemporary like pop and
rock and then there’s world music which
is probably the most vague and
problematic genre of them all now while
music genres tend to give us some
insight into the kind of sounds that
we’re going to hear these
categorizations often create divisions
I’m a musician so as my friends hear
Aundre we both study jazz here at the
Frost School of Music but our influences
go a lot deeper than that I grew up
singing sara bareilles and playing
Chopin Nocturne
and on trigger off with Bill Evans and
Billy Joel I both have many different
influences but well now we we both play
in a lot of different styles I sing with
a folk trio I play piano for musicals
and I also play my own music with Andre
sometimes which is kind of searching for
its own genre now we’re not necessarily
unique in this way we both have many
different influences but many many
musicians grow up listening to a variety
of styles and play more than one now
very typically when I play a jazz
standards like bewitched or I could
write a book for an older audience
they tends to say well this they tend to
get really excited about this right and
they’re biased towards the music that
they’re playing I’ll be which and I
could write a book are both jazz
standards from the Great American
Songbook and older generation is biased
towards this music and we’re biased too
towards the music of our own day musical
nostalgia to quote mark Joseph Stern
isn’t just a cultural phenomenon it’s an
erotic command now typically the music
that we listen to during our formative
years is deeply rooted in the culture
that surrounds us reflecting our
personal identities our social lives and
our neighborhoods and the outside
world’s influence but as it’s an erotic
command essentially when we listen to
music that we like our brains release
the neurotransmitters dopamine and
serotonin that make us feel great it’s
the same stuff that makes us feel good
when we have sex or when we eat a really
good piece of cake and when we’re
teenagers our brains are on hyper speed
making rapid-fire neural connections
while growth hormones run rampant in our
bodies all during the most formative
years of our personal identities and
social lives so this all makes the
connection between music emotion and
memory really amplified now when as we
grow older to quote dr. adrian north
we do listen to new music but with a
bias towards that which sounds similar
to that which we listen to ages 16 to 24
and second the actual pieces that we
listen to tend to become more complex as
we grow older so imagine a girl from
Pennsylvania who grew up on dad rock
before transitioning to pop punk around
junior high now she may grow older to
listen to a slightly more sophisticated
blend of music but no matter how many
new artists she introduces to her
library none will sound as sweet as the
Fall Out Boy that she listened to when
she was 14 yeah pop punk is forever the
definition of music is pretty vague we
can infer that music is basically sounds
that has harmonic rhythmic and melodic
continuity but we know that this isn’t
necessarily always true who here has
heard of John Cage’s 433 anyone yeah
we’ve got a couple of tentative hands so
I gave this presentation in my choir the
other day and everyone was like really
excited about that so I’m glad to share
this with you guys so for those of you
wondering Andre is actually playing it
right now yeah it’s really beautiful
right
so 433 is literally four minutes and 33
seconds of the pianists not playing a
single note it’s just four minutes and
33 seconds of listening to the room
around us well this is a bit more
extreme of an example yes and it’s
making a statement John Cage was famous
for that but the idea is that we can
find music in anything we can find music
in birds chirping in a forest or a
street performance of percussive trash
cans Oh John Cage himself said that
everything we do is music this is all
very nice but it doesn’t really give us
an exact idea of what of what music
actually can be defined as so if we take
a closer look at definitions of three
major Western music genres we see that
the definitions have an idea of the
harmonic language maybe or harmonic
language or instruments that are typical
in certain types of music but these
ideas don’t necessarily give us
the best idea of how to define the
genres the one thing that’s consistent
in all three of the music genres is the
mention of a time or location of origin
so music like language is acquired
through cultural transmission so just as
we incorporate the slang that we hear
all around us into our daily vocabulary
we take musical cues from our
environment as well I listen to pop punk
because my middle school friends listen
to pop punk and I study jazz now because
I got to college and started to jam with
my friends who play jazz perhaps more
important than the actual sound of the
music is the tradition and culture
involved the thing about not the sound
but the ritual involved so often it’s
the audience participation that helps to
define a genre sometimes it’s a bit more
obvious as in the different ways that we
dress or prepare for a show at an opera
house or a jazz club or an underground
basement show and sometimes it’s a bit
more subtle as in the different Latin
American clubs and dances involved in
Samba bachata and salsa now I was asking
my friend Sri Hari yeah to get an idea
of what the what the cultural sounds of
his native country India are and because
every culture of course has their own
unique traditions and he told me that
genre is our only proof of cultural
difference Oh
in India it’s an incredibly diverse
country and all the different regions
have their unique sounds in the north
for example there’s Sufi there is Indian
trance Indian ballads and Punjabi music
as well as the Western music that has
infiltrated and then I asked another
friend of mine from Tokyo who for this a
similar in some way it’s there and he
told me that the Japanese musical
tradition is based on the more quiet and
observant nature of the Japanese people
often because of the isolation of their
islands the Japanese
the Japanese tends to be really
fantastic copiers and they’re really
great at incorporating the sounds from
other places and fusing them with their
own ow no this can be found in their
electronic hip hop and jazz fusion music
I haven’t yet gotten to travel to India
or Japan but I have gotten to travel a
bit on my own and I’ve met some really
interesting people through those travels
now in January I was talking to a man
from Germany on a plane we happened to
sit next to each other and we were
talking about different languages and
cultures and he said something that I
found really interesting he said that a
language reflects the people who speak
it ow his native language of German is a
very direct language it’s not
necessarily considered it’s the most
beautiful language by everyone but it is
very efficient like it’s people of this
the admiration for efficiency can be
found in can be found in their
architecture as well as their cars right
now by contrast he told me that he lived
in Thailand for several years for about
10 years now Thai can be a bit of a
challenge to learn especially for
Westerners and this isn’t just because
their alphabet is completely different
and we can’t sound out the words like we
would in most Latin or Germanic based
languages this is actually because
according to him Thai includes extra
letters in Words just because they look
aesthetically pleasing Thai culture is
similarly treasures ornate beauty which
we can see in their architecture as well
now let’s take this example of of a
couple different languages now if we
took a Spanish and Italian speaker and
we put them in a room together and told
them to go crazy you become best friends
they might have a bit of a challenge
talking to each other right so they
speak totally different languages but
Spanish and Italian are both Romance
languages they’re very similar
grammatically and they have many cognate
sooo many similar
in vocabulary so while they wouldn’t
exactly be able to to speak the other’s
language they’d probably be able to get
a gist of what the other is saying the
same could be said for music so let’s
say the same scenario but in this case
it’s two guitarists one who plays
classical guitar and one who plays jazz
so a classical guitarist has a very
specific technique often the guitar is
held upright with the neck up here and
the strings are made of nylon rather
than metal like we would find in
acoustic or electric guitars and jazz
guitarists tend to hold them down here
slight differences but more or less
they’re playing the same notes on just
about the same instrument and while
they’re playing is a completely
different style they’d probably be able
to appreciate the others playing even if
they couldn’t reproduce it themselves
now all musicians don’t necessarily play
the same way just as all humans don’t
necessarily speak the same way but often
the similarities outweigh the
differences I’ll imagine if every human
on earth spoke the same language in
India alone there are 122 major
languages spoken and there are about
sixteen hundred others spoken as well
and worldwide there are over 7,000
languages spoken now I’m not trying to
claim that every music genre or every
language is the same that’s crazy but
just as a language is made up of
conversations which are made of
sentences made of words made of letters
many agree that music is a language in
its own right made up of songs which are
made of phrases made of notes often two
languages are grammatically similar or
share an alphabet and the similarities
can be found in music genres as well and
while every language or music genre is
going to have its unique expressions
often the similarities outweigh the
differences how earlier I mentioned
bewitched and I could write a book these
are two really commonly performed jazz
tunes but they weren’t actually written
for jazz musicians at all they’re from
the same Rodgers and Hart musical that I
hadn’t heard of before called pal Joey
and the crossover like this can be found
they’re places as well like Queen’s
Bohemian Rhapsody which which is
basically a rock opera work unless is
performed by Kanye West in which case
this is something completely different
Jeremy denk a classical pianist has
called box Goldberg Variations the
biggest jazz riff of all time and in the
1400s guillaume de fight turned his
secular basically pop song into a mass
of the same name Messala fossae paulo
and then there is Gershwin grace man is
probably one of the best examples of the
crossover between genres let’s take his
folk opera Porgy and Bess this produced
some really commonly performed songs
like summertime which has been performed
by musicians of just about every genre
he proved he composed I’ve got rhythm
which is one of the most influential in
jazz history but just like bewitched and
I could write a book wasn’t actually
written for jazz musicians it’s from a
musical called girl-crazy which also
featured the tunes embraceable you and
but not for me he’s also composed
classical orchestral works like his
Concerto in F as well as a Cuban
overture and then there’s his
little-known piece Rhapsody in Blue
which is basically a symphonic jazz work
now Gershwin had his feet in so many
different genres though we might think
he was like part octopus if we didn’t
have photographic evidence of his two
legs but his work is while it is
indefinable
its beloved and that’s because it all
sounds like Gershwin let’s now if you do
a quick Google search of genre names
like weird genre names you’ll find works
from from Spotify and others neo-soul
electro-swing medieval rock free folk
but but and that’s awesome so there’s
something for everyone and
as there’s so many different music
genres no I’m not trying to say that
every music genre is the same again just
like every human doesn’t speak the same
way but just as humans can learn in more
than one language musicians and music
lovers can expand their listening palate
if we get too caught up in the labels
then we tend to miss out on some really
fantastic music you know we tend to
define ourselves as classical jazz or
contemporary in the music world but like
Gershwin we should be using these
traditions to inspire and to affect what
we are creating while striving to sound
our most authentic oh let’s get back to
Beethoven and Michael Jackson moonlight
sonata and Thriller one of them is was
composed by a romantic a pivotal
romantic composer in 1801 and the other
was written by the King of Pop and
performed by the King of Pop in 1982 the
one is a classical a solo classical
piano piece and the other uses heavy
modern production but they both are in
the same key they’re both in c-sharp
minor so that’s something right now
Gershwin oh sorry
Michael Jackson and Beethoven may not
have spoken the same language verbally
or musically but their message is the
same
create what is genuine and don’t get too
caught up in labels now if Beethoven and
Michael Jackson could have this much in
common maybe we have more in common than
we think
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
thank you
[Applause]
know a brand new boy student she’s a
nine year old girl and I was asking her
the typical questions that I asked new
students like what’s your favorite color
what’s your favorite animal what kind of
music do you like
she told me that her favorite color is
purple and her favorite animal is dogs
which I approved of so it was fine we
knew that we’d have a decent
teacher-student relationship and then
she surprised me by saying that not
talking about her favorite artist or her
favorite style of music but by telling
me that she’s really interested in music
history well she told me that after
probing a little bit further that she
has heard of both Beethoven and Michael
Jackson
so music history to her is moonlight
sonata and thriller and I thought that
that was kind of charming but I I wasn’t
exactly sure why these particular
artists were the two that liked that she
thought of immediately so after I gave
her kind of a brief overview of his of
the history of western music I was
telling her about the medieval era and
the Baroque and everything I started to
think about how we got to this point and
why these are the two that she thought
of now we typically define music by
genre we are human and we like to
categorize so there’s classical there’s
jazz there’s contemporary like pop and
rock and then there’s world music which
is probably the most vague and
problematic genre of them all now while
music genres tend to give us some
insight into the kind of sounds that
we’re going to hear these
categorizations often create divisions
I’m a musician so as my friends hear
Aundre we both study jazz here at the
Frost School of Music but our influences
go a lot deeper than that I grew up
singing sara bareilles and playing
Chopin Nocturne
and on trigger off with Bill Evans and
Billy Joel I both have many different
influences but well now we we both play
in a lot of different styles I sing with
a folk trio I play piano for musicals
and I also play my own music with Andre
sometimes which is kind of searching for
its own genre now we’re not necessarily
unique in this way we both have many
different influences but many many
musicians grow up listening to a variety
of styles and play more than one now
very typically when I play a jazz
standards like bewitched or I could
write a book for an older audience
they tends to say well this they tend to
get really excited about this right and
they’re biased towards the music that
they’re playing I’ll be which and I
could write a book are both jazz
standards from the Great American
Songbook and older generation is biased
towards this music and we’re biased too
towards the music of our own day musical
nostalgia to quote mark Joseph Stern
isn’t just a cultural phenomenon it’s an
erotic command now typically the music
that we listen to during our formative
years is deeply rooted in the culture
that surrounds us reflecting our
personal identities our social lives and
our neighborhoods and the outside
world’s influence but as it’s an erotic
command essentially when we listen to
music that we like our brains release
the neurotransmitters dopamine and
serotonin that make us feel great it’s
the same stuff that makes us feel good
when we have sex or when we eat a really
good piece of cake and when we’re
teenagers our brains are on hyper speed
making rapid-fire neural connections
while growth hormones run rampant in our
bodies all during the most formative
years of our personal identities and
social lives so this all makes the
connection between music emotion and
memory really amplified now when as we
grow older to quote dr. adrian north
we do listen to new music but with a
bias towards that which sounds similar
to that which we listen to ages 16 to 24
and second the actual pieces that we
listen to tend to become more complex as
we grow older so imagine a girl from
Pennsylvania who grew up on dad rock
before transitioning to pop punk around
junior high now she may grow older to
listen to a slightly more sophisticated
blend of music but no matter how many
new artists she introduces to her
library none will sound as sweet as the
Fall Out Boy that she listened to when
she was 14 yeah pop punk is forever the
definition of music is pretty vague we
can infer that music is basically sounds
that has harmonic rhythmic and melodic
continuity but we know that this isn’t
necessarily always true who here has
heard of John Cage’s 433 anyone yeah
we’ve got a couple of tentative hands so
I gave this presentation in my choir the
other day and everyone was like really
excited about that so I’m glad to share
this with you guys so for those of you
wondering Andre is actually playing it
right now yeah it’s really beautiful
right
so 433 is literally four minutes and 33
seconds of the pianists not playing a
single note it’s just four minutes and
33 seconds of listening to the room
around us well this is a bit more
extreme of an example yes and it’s
making a statement John Cage was famous
for that but the idea is that we can
find music in anything we can find music
in birds chirping in a forest or a
street performance of percussive trash
cans Oh John Cage himself said that
everything we do is music this is all
very nice but it doesn’t really give us
an exact idea of what of what music
actually can be defined as so if we take
a closer look at definitions of three
major Western music genres we see that
the definitions have an idea of the
harmonic language maybe or harmonic
language or instruments that are typical
in certain types of music but these
ideas don’t necessarily give us
the best idea of how to define the
genres the one thing that’s consistent
in all three of the music genres is the
mention of a time or location of origin
so music like language is acquired
through cultural transmission so just as
we incorporate the slang that we hear
all around us into our daily vocabulary
we take musical cues from our
environment as well I listen to pop punk
because my middle school friends listen
to pop punk and I study jazz now because
I got to college and started to jam with
my friends who play jazz perhaps more
important than the actual sound of the
music is the tradition and culture
involved the thing about not the sound
but the ritual involved so often it’s
the audience participation that helps to
define a genre sometimes it’s a bit more
obvious as in the different ways that we
dress or prepare for a show at an opera
house or a jazz club or an underground
basement show and sometimes it’s a bit
more subtle as in the different Latin
American clubs and dances involved in
Samba bachata and salsa now I was asking
my friend Sri Hari yeah to get an idea
of what the what the cultural sounds of
his native country India are and because
every culture of course has their own
unique traditions and he told me that
genre is our only proof of cultural
difference Oh
in India it’s an incredibly diverse
country and all the different regions
have their unique sounds in the north
for example there’s Sufi there is Indian
trance Indian ballads and Punjabi music
as well as the Western music that has
infiltrated and then I asked another
friend of mine from Tokyo who for this a
similar in some way it’s there and he
told me that the Japanese musical
tradition is based on the more quiet and
observant nature of the Japanese people
often because of the isolation of their
islands the Japanese
the Japanese tends to be really
fantastic copiers and they’re really
great at incorporating the sounds from
other places and fusing them with their
own ow no this can be found in their
electronic hip hop and jazz fusion music
I haven’t yet gotten to travel to India
or Japan but I have gotten to travel a
bit on my own and I’ve met some really
interesting people through those travels
now in January I was talking to a man
from Germany on a plane we happened to
sit next to each other and we were
talking about different languages and
cultures and he said something that I
found really interesting he said that a
language reflects the people who speak
it ow his native language of German is a
very direct language it’s not
necessarily considered it’s the most
beautiful language by everyone but it is
very efficient like it’s people of this
the admiration for efficiency can be
found in can be found in their
architecture as well as their cars right
now by contrast he told me that he lived
in Thailand for several years for about
10 years now Thai can be a bit of a
challenge to learn especially for
Westerners and this isn’t just because
their alphabet is completely different
and we can’t sound out the words like we
would in most Latin or Germanic based
languages this is actually because
according to him Thai includes extra
letters in Words just because they look
aesthetically pleasing Thai culture is
similarly treasures ornate beauty which
we can see in their architecture as well
now let’s take this example of of a
couple different languages now if we
took a Spanish and Italian speaker and
we put them in a room together and told
them to go crazy you become best friends
they might have a bit of a challenge
talking to each other right so they
speak totally different languages but
Spanish and Italian are both Romance
languages they’re very similar
grammatically and they have many cognate
sooo many similar
in vocabulary so while they wouldn’t
exactly be able to to speak the other’s
language they’d probably be able to get
a gist of what the other is saying the
same could be said for music so let’s
say the same scenario but in this case
it’s two guitarists one who plays
classical guitar and one who plays jazz
so a classical guitarist has a very
specific technique often the guitar is
held upright with the neck up here and
the strings are made of nylon rather
than metal like we would find in
acoustic or electric guitars and jazz
guitarists tend to hold them down here
slight differences but more or less
they’re playing the same notes on just
about the same instrument and while
they’re playing is a completely
different style they’d probably be able
to appreciate the others playing even if
they couldn’t reproduce it themselves
now all musicians don’t necessarily play
the same way just as all humans don’t
necessarily speak the same way but often
the similarities outweigh the
differences I’ll imagine if every human
on earth spoke the same language in
India alone there are 122 major
languages spoken and there are about
sixteen hundred others spoken as well
and worldwide there are over 7,000
languages spoken now I’m not trying to
claim that every music genre or every
language is the same that’s crazy but
just as a language is made up of
conversations which are made of
sentences made of words made of letters
many agree that music is a language in
its own right made up of songs which are
made of phrases made of notes often two
languages are grammatically similar or
share an alphabet and the similarities
can be found in music genres as well and
while every language or music genre is
going to have its unique expressions
often the similarities outweigh the
differences how earlier I mentioned
bewitched and I could write a book these
are two really commonly performed jazz
tunes but they weren’t actually written
for jazz musicians at all they’re from
the same Rodgers and Hart musical that I
hadn’t heard of before called pal Joey
and the crossover like this can be found
they’re places as well like Queen’s
Bohemian Rhapsody which which is
basically a rock opera work unless is
performed by Kanye West in which case
this is something completely different
Jeremy denk a classical pianist has
called box Goldberg Variations the
biggest jazz riff of all time and in the
1400s guillaume de fight turned his
secular basically pop song into a mass
of the same name Messala fossae paulo
and then there is Gershwin grace man is
probably one of the best examples of the
crossover between genres let’s take his
folk opera Porgy and Bess this produced
some really commonly performed songs
like summertime which has been performed
by musicians of just about every genre
he proved he composed I’ve got rhythm
which is one of the most influential in
jazz history but just like bewitched and
I could write a book wasn’t actually
written for jazz musicians it’s from a
musical called girl-crazy which also
featured the tunes embraceable you and
but not for me he’s also composed
classical orchestral works like his
Concerto in F as well as a Cuban
overture and then there’s his
little-known piece Rhapsody in Blue
which is basically a symphonic jazz work
now Gershwin had his feet in so many
different genres though we might think
he was like part octopus if we didn’t
have photographic evidence of his two
legs but his work is while it is
indefinable
its beloved and that’s because it all
sounds like Gershwin let’s now if you do
a quick Google search of genre names
like weird genre names you’ll find works
from from Spotify and others neo-soul
electro-swing medieval rock free folk
but but and that’s awesome so there’s
something for everyone and
as there’s so many different music
genres no I’m not trying to say that
every music genre is the same again just
like every human doesn’t speak the same
way but just as humans can learn in more
than one language musicians and music
lovers can expand their listening palate
if we get too caught up in the labels
then we tend to miss out on some really
fantastic music you know we tend to
define ourselves as classical jazz or
contemporary in the music world but like
Gershwin we should be using these
traditions to inspire and to affect what
we are creating while striving to sound
our most authentic oh let’s get back to
Beethoven and Michael Jackson moonlight
sonata and Thriller one of them is was
composed by a romantic a pivotal
romantic composer in 1801 and the other
was written by the King of Pop and
performed by the King of Pop in 1982 the
one is a classical a solo classical
piano piece and the other uses heavy
modern production but they both are in
the same key they’re both in c-sharp
minor so that’s something right now
Gershwin oh sorry
Michael Jackson and Beethoven may not
have spoken the same language verbally
or musically but their message is the
same
create what is genuine and don’t get too
caught up in labels now if Beethoven and
Michael Jackson could have this much in
common maybe we have more in common than
we think
[Music]
[Music]
[Music]
thank you
[Applause]
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