My Musical Culture

Our first blog posts are going to have several purposes: 1. To get you back into the habit of writing about music 2. To prompt you to figure out how to use certain tech aspects of Blogger, and 3. To let us get to know something  about each other's musical experiences and preferences. And, if we're lucky, you'll all get to learn about a music that you didn't already know about but find yourself enjoying!

Here's your blog topic. I want you to write about the types of music you like (or not) and specific pieces or artists that you find especially important. Specifically, I want you to tell us three things:

1. Share with us an example of music that has really meant something to you personally for awhile--say, a year or more. It can be attached to a specific event or person, from your childhood or your college years, or just something that you find yourself returning to over and over for any reason. 
2. Share with us an example of music that you've found yourself turning to at some point since the pandemic started. It can be a song, an artist, a soundtrack, or whatever you've found yourself really wanting to listen to. It needs to be different from the first example you shared.
3. Share with us an example of music that, for whatever reason, you just don't really connect with or understand. But as you're writing about it, see if you can convey your thoughts in respectful language--after all, someone somewhere would probably cite that song in one of the first two categories.

As you share these pieces, here are a few ground rules. You can't just post the piece--you need to tell us something about it and why it fits into that category. Tell us a story, if you can. And you need to actually share the music with us. The best way to do that is to actually embed the video (if you have a video).  Click on the "Insert Video" in the icons above the window you type in and follow the instructions. If for some reason your particular video is out-of-the-ordinary and won't embed, at least provide a link by using the Insert Link function. Hot tip: if your video window seems small, click on the little pencil icon in the upper LH corner and choose "HTML View." That view has a bunch of computer code info. Locate the word "height" and replace the number after it with 400, and then locate the word "width" and replace the number after it with 750. Voila! your videos are larger! And, believe it or not, you just did a simple computer coding maneuver! Oh, and start the blog post telling us at least a little bit about yourself, so that we have an idea of your background. I'd love it if you'd include a picture of yourself, so we can start to recognize each other--it's not required, though. We're looking for a total of at least 400 words here (my example is almost 700.)

To get us started, here's My Musical Culture:

Hi all! I'm Dr. Kelly McElrath Vaneman, and I'm the professor of this class. I've been a musician my whole life. I started both piano lessons and church choir when I was six, but I'd been  singing my own little songs and banging on the piano even earlier than that--basically, I've been musicking as long as I can remember. In middle school, I started playing the oboe, and from that point on I knew I'd basically be a professional musician of some sort for the rest of my life. 

I grew up in West Texas, in the mid-sized town of San Angelo. I've lived in a number of places in Texas, but between graduating from Baylor and starting teaching at Converse I also lived in Connecticut, New York City, and Brussels, Belgium. I love my life here in Spartanburg--my husband also teaches at Converse in music, our 16-year-old kid attends Spartanburg High, and our dog Biscuit believes deeply in walks and treats :-) 

(A word about the picture of my family. Even if you don't notice it, I've enhanced it with something we call "alt text"--it's a description of the picture that allows folks with visual impairments to know what it's a picture of. In this case, I've included the alt text "Dr. Vaneman's husband, kid, and dog, in the forest with flowers." If you include pictures in your blogs in this class, I'd like to ask you to do the same. It's actually really easy. After you upload an image, click on it. A menu will pop up, and the right-most option is the "settings" icon. Click on it, and you'll see a space where you can type in your alt text--just type in a description of the image in a few words. Voilá! You've made your blog more accessible!)

So, obviously, music is a central  part of my life. And I'd like to share some of that importance with you.

1. An example of music that's important to me. In recent years, I've been doing a certain amount of music composing. Summer of 2019, I decided that I wanted to write a piece for me, my husband, and our kid  to perform. The trick, though, is that Dr. Mr. Vaneman and I are both professional musicians, but Tally, while a good high school pianist and singer and percussionist, is in a very different place in her musical journey. So I wrote the following piece for us--instead of playing an instrument, Tally claps and stomps and snaps. Tal might be young, but her sense of rhythm is fantastic! The video is from a video we made last summer for Together SpARTanburg, a consortium of arts organizations in Spartanburg that came together to create and share artistic content online during quarantine. Here is "Third Wheel," performed by my little family in our living room.

2. An example of music thats helped me get through the pandemic. Now, I like lots and lots of different kinds of music--classical, pop, rock, folk, global, and lots more. A pandemic is going to affect different folks in different ways, and I noticed two ways that it shifted my thoughts during the entirety of the spring and summer--small things, but still pretty pronounced in ways that surprised me. The first way my thoughts shifted is that I found myself wanting to wear clothes that were colorful! I normally wear a fair amount of black, but I almost couldn't bear to wear black until school started in the fall. And my musical tastes changed in a similar way--all I've wanted to listen to was Taylor Swift! Specifically, I listened to her "Lover" album almost nonstop during the summer, "Folklore" throughout the fall, and "Evermore" over the winter break. I've never thought of myself as a Taylor Swift fan at all, but suddenly her music has seemed to provide the lightness that I needed in the midst of uncertainty. This video of Taylor is an NPR Tiny Desk Concert--a series that I've loved for years. She sings several of the songs off of Lover, as well as a couple of others. I love her openness and the way she communicates with the audience.

3. An example of a music I don't actually like. OK, this one's tricky for me because, as I said, I like lots and lots of music. For instance, I really like the Beatles--so many of their songs are wonderful in so many ways. But, for some reason, I absolutely cannot stand their song "Come Together." It just creeps me out! It might be because the first time I heard it was during the Bee Gee's movie "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band," a movie based on Beatles songs performed by other folks in the late 1970s. "Come Together" was performed by Aerosmith, and I think their weird strutting at the captured Strawberry Fields (that's the girl's name) just was more than 9-year-old me could handle. To be fair, though, I know that lots of my friends really like the song. Objectively, I get it--but I still find it unnerving to listen to! Here's the clip from the film:

This blog entry is due on Friday, February 26, by 11:59 pm. It's important that you finish your blog and publish it by that point, because then, over the weekend, you'll need to read and comment on four of your classmates' blogs--by 11:59 pm on Monday, March 1. Details on how you should actually turn those two assignments can be found in the Assignment portals on Canvas. A final tip: before you publish your blog entry, click on "Preview" in the upper RH corner and proofread your entry--I always find typos or things I'd like to change.