# Musical experience accompanied with a keen sense of and fascination with history?



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Sometimes I am particularly fascinated not only with the music, but with what the music represents from whatever time it was conceived. Other times, I'm more attentive to the forms themselves and do not experience any deeper sense of awe and speculation at the world the music came from. Sometimes, it seems like I can feel the time period of a piece, like its a window into the world back then. I don't really know how to describe this, so others might not pick up on my precise thought process, but does music for you represent the time it came from? I'm not curious about it in its cold technical sense, I mean, do you feel the time in the music, as though it is a connection to the past? Like looking at a photograph from 1840, I had the experience of doing that the other day, and this provided a more direct path to that feeling of past connectedness that I believe music can also provide.

Back when I listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, The Who, I was particularly fascinated not just with the music itself, but the fact that it was a direct window to a time that I have no access to. This is a sort of inspired listening that drives one to read about composers and history. I've been feeling out of touch with that lately. I like those day dreamy moments where I feel in another time and place while listening to a piece of music. Have you gotten this feeling with any composition lately? How do you feel out music and its historical context?

Perhaps it would do better to title this thread, "music and its ability to stir the soul of the past in you"


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I do often get a sense of another time and place, in the magnificent feeling of _sehnsucht_ and _saudade_ as the Germans and Portuguese would say, but these times and places are never the ones where the music comes from. I've never had that.


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

I have an interest in history, especially medieval, and listening to music from the era can be a spur to thought and to study, and definitely provides insight into the era.


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## Lunasong (Mar 15, 2011)

This is why I like Michael Steen's book _The Lives & Times of the Great Composers_ so much, because I learned more about European history from this book than I ever did in my American classrooms. And in a context to which I can easily connect!


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

It's so important for teachers (when they have the time) to relate history to their students' interests. Everything turns out better that way. 

As for myself, I am more historical than musical by inclination, so it's generally about impossible for me to block out the historical associations if I try, and I rarely want to anyway.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Although it is not essential - music exists apart from its time - it does let you experience directly what those in the past did. If you reconstruct the setting and the instruments/vocal techniques, you come pretty close to being in the same environment of those who were listening in that time. And each era reflects a different world outlook, so it helps me to understand the way different eras thought. 

What interests me about older music from my time is the nostalgia factor. The other night Funny Face was on TV, and the moment I flipped to it, they were playing the old song Dream in the background. Suddenly I was transported to the days when my old band played dances for couples my parents' age and how good I felt being able to make these peoples' faces glow as we brought them back to the days of their youth. Today, my wife and I go to a rest home and sing old hymns for these same people, and it's wonderful to see their eyes sparkle as in their minds they're transported to a different place. 

Fred Davis wrote that nostalgia allows people "to maintain their identity in the face of major transitions like childhood to pubescence, adolescence to adulthood, single to married life, and spouse to parent." I agree; and I think it's a good thing.


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## Lunasong (Mar 15, 2011)

I think it is very cool the point that clavichorder and Manxfeeder brought up about experiencing the music in the same way those in the past did (except WE have recordings we can play at will!). I have not thought of music in that way (although I have thought of religious liturgy like this) and it is a neat way to connect to a different time. 
Someone (maybe Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon??) said that pop music itself is not so memorable, but hearing a "oldies" pop song can take one back to a moment in one's life in which that song played a part.


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## Meaghan (Jul 31, 2010)

I think my developing fascination with 19th century Germany and Austria and my love of 19th century Germanic music feed each other. I enjoy feeling like I have a sense of what life was like in other times and places, and music is part of that. I was thinking that I finally caught the history bug from my history teacher father after all these years, but then I remembered that I went through a period of three or four years back in elementary school when I was really interested in history and read and _wrote_ a lot of historical fiction.

But anyway, yes. I like striving to understand what music meant to people (especially its composers) at the time it was written, and this is what drives me to read composer biographies and things like that. Reading Mahler's biography and Ethel Smyth's memoirs gives me a vivid sense of time and place that I then continue to experience when I listen to their music, and in a way, it makes me feel almost nostalgic for things I never even lived through.


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## BlazC (Jan 6, 2012)

It struck me the other month just how deeply rooted in my region's (eastern/central Europe) heritage Mahler's music is, when I passed a brass band playing some marching music in a pavillion in the park. I kind of experienced a link to the past while looking around the once Austro-Hungarian city I live in and listening to the band's poorly but enthusiastically executed playing of some uplifting scores. This particular musical tradition never went away and when I'm hearing Gustl's symphonies, I am always reminded of the old times. 

Other than this pleasant event, I attended concerts by Ciccolini and Boulez in December. I was fascinated with the historical presence in the hall even before they started playing (or conducting for that matter), if we are also to describe our "living history" experiences


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