Ron Price

A useful OVERVIEW of the history of music and some interesting DEVELOPMENTS and ACTIVITIES in the world of music at the following links:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/mar/06/the-musical-mystery/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/15/playing-in-time/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-truth-force-at-the-met/

If you google the words 'RonPrice music' you will also gain access to many of my internet posts on music.

MY MEMOIRS:
PIONEERING OVER FIVE EPOCHS
SECTION IX: NOTEBOOKS
MUSIC

INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC NOTEBOOKS

1.1 Classical Music 1.2 Classical Music
1.1.A Popular: Folk/Rock Music 1.1.B Jazz Music

Music has played an important part in my life unlike the many forms of dance and gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming which are sports that incorporate dance. In addition some of the martial arts are often compared to dance and the martial arts have never gained a foothold in my interest inventory and experience. But music has not been a peripheral part of my life.  In primary school from 1950 to 1957 music was a regular part of the curriculum.  My mother and father both played the piano and sang in choirs during those years.  We had sing-alongs in our home, with our family, with friends and with the Baha’i community as I entered my late childhood in about 1953/4.  We listened to classical music around the house from my birth in 1944 until my father died in 1965.  Then my mother and I moved into different houses.  I moved to another town and then another and then another country; in the process this family musical experience ended. Living in that family of birth, my consanguineal family as sociologists call it, ended in 1965.  The rest of my life has been spent in two affinal families, families by marriage.  My musical experience in those two families is another story some of which I tell below.

In the mid-to-late fifties I became interested in rock and roll, listened to it on the radio in my bedroom among other places and in 1965 I bought my first LP: Barry McGuire’s The Eve of Destruction.  My mother gave me the family copy of The Messiah that same year and these two LPs launched my collection. I purchased LPs and 45s, as they were known, until 1975 by which time I had accumulated some 60 LPs and 45s. In 1975 my first marriage ended and with it, it seems in retrospect, my purchase of records and my extensive listening to music in my home. Judy, my first wife, and I never had a TV and listening to records was an important part of our shared experience.  In the following years I had to scale-back my purchases of records due to having to raise three children and the increased cost of records. My second wife and her two daughters were more interested in watching TV, engaging in sport and, for various reasons like the fracturing and diversity of our musical tastes as well as the birth of my only child, listening to records in my home seriously diminished by the late-1970s.

I started to learn to play the guitar in 1968 after an unsuccessful attempt at classical guitar in 1962/3. I taught music in my role as a primary teacher from 1967 to 1971.  In 1989 I taught guitar to a class of Aboriginal students at a technical and further education(Tafe) college in Perth Western Australia.  I led sing-alongs from 1968 to 1999 and then, in 1999, I retired from the teaching profession. In 2000 I joined a small group of singers in George Town Tasmania, my new home town, to entertain residents in an aged-care facility called Ainslie House in that same town, the oldest town in Australia(1804). I continued singing with that group until May of 2005.  In 2008 I began to play the guitar and to lead those same residents in singalongs using my “sixties singalong music booklet.”  This was a revised booklet from earlier collections I had made as far back as the 1960s.

In 2000 I also had access to some 50 CDs as part of my role of Baha’i radio program presenter on City Park Radio.  By April 2005 I had presented about 150 half hour programs and this activity also came to an end that year exactly forty years after buying my first LP.   Such, in summary, is a brief history of my musical experience.  I have made a list of the pieces of music I have enjoyed most and it can be found in my computer directory, my two-ring binder sing-along file and on the internet at several sites.  I also have a list of all the records I own in that same file. This particular music file has four sub-sections divided as outlined at the start of this introduction: two popular music sections and two classical sections. They contain separate lists of articles about music, articles I began to save in 1984, but did not begin to save seriously until the year 2000. I opened this file for these articles and resources in 2004 after twenty years of slowly accumulating the material. It has become a serious collection in the last seven years(2004-2011) in my effort to write poetry with musical themes. In 2005 I divided the resources into: (a) classical and (b) popular and placed them in separate files. In 2006 I opened a jazz section(1.1.B), a sub-section of the popular music file.

I should mention, in closing this introduction to my musical experience, that radio and television have played an important part in my musical life beginning as far back as 1943.  This is not the place to summarize nearly 70 years of radio and more than 35 years of television and their respective musical influences.  I should say, though, that in these first twelve years of retirement, 1999 to 2011, my musical experience comes in the main from: (a) the internet where I can dial-up virtually any piece of music I want and (b) an Akai radio-tape-digital audio CD sound system. After two years of such simple dial-up activity I find I am listening mainly to classical music.  Of course TV has provided part of my musical fare, but by the retirement age of 65 in 2009 very little.  Occasionally I used to get an LP bug and listen to classical music from my collection of LPs, but by 2009 and the age of 65 I had come to listen, as I say above, virtually entirely to classical items on the internet and my Akai system.

One of the aims in these first 12 years of my retirement has been to integrate music, life's activities and my attitudes, beliefs and values, in a word, my religious beliefs in different ways in my poetry and in postings on the internet.  The resources in the files in my study here in Tasmania, as well as the immense cornucopia of resources that is the world-wide-web, represent a base of information for my prose-poetic-writing. At this second decade of my retirement begins, music and writing have become an immensely stimulating cross-fertilization.

Ron Price
18/6/'07 to 4/9/'11

A LONG CONVERSATION

In the last half of March 2011 I enjoyed two Elvis Costello interviews with Bruce Springsteen on ABC TV in Australia.(1)  Life is busy even in retirement and it took me one week to synthesize Springsteen’s ideas about R&R.  He talked about R&R's new energy and direction since Elvis Presley in the ‘50s and the explosion of R&R in the 1960s. The answers Springsteen gave to Costello’s questions led to this prose-poem.  I must say that I am certainly no authority on Springsteen or his music.  I have simply enjoyed some of his songs over the years since he came to fame in the early to mid-70s some 40 years ago.  His early years(1962-1972) and his years of initial struggle for success(1972-1974) mirrored my own.  My career in the teaching profession took off about the same time as Springsteen’s in the music world but, of course, I never flew as high.  We all fly in the sky and sink into the earth in varying degrees of success and failure in our earthly life.-Ron Price with thanks to: (1)“Spectacle: Elvis Costello With Bruce,” ABC TV, 11:30-12:15 a.m., 17 and 24 March 2011.

You said, Bruce, that so many of
your songs were about identity:
who am I and where am I going?
spot on, Bruce! That’s what my
poetry is all about too and we all
tell stories in such different ways
because our identity is so unique.
But getting other people to share
one’s obsessions is a big ask, Bruce.
You can die trying…..We each work
out our modus operandi, our modus
vivendi, as we walk the walk and talk
the talk, eh Bruce? Life-art is one long
conversation with our audience, Bruce,
eh? And one must keep one’s little bit
of sermonizing in very low gear: people
run away if you turn up the volume, eh?
You just can’t tell others what to think,
can you Bruce? So thanks, Bruce, for your
helping me manage what’s eating me. You
put things well....Bruce after all your years
back to 1962 when we both got going....me(1)
on my Baha’i trip and you with your many &
several commitments with our respective
impacts on the marketplace of ideas.....you
were definitely a winner there, yes....Bruce:
congratulations!!!

(1) The birth of R&R coincided with the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963) in which I was involved. This was the first international teaching Plan of the global Baha’i community which my family was involved with starting in Burlington Ontario in 1953.

Ron Price
23 to 30 March 2011 and 30 May 2011

Singalongs And My Two-2 Ring Binders: 1943 To 2013

This 2000 word essay explores the story of the gradual evolution of singalongs and singalong booklets in my life: 1943 to 2013.   Both my mother and father had been involved in singalongs before I was born.  In my prenatal, neonatal, and childhood life singalongs were part of my lived-experience. The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to 1950 when I was five years old. The first booklet of music that I put together myself in order to run singalongs was in the late 1960s, in 1968 when I was twenty-four.  From about 1950 to about 1965, my years of growing up in the family home, I ran along on the singalong booklets of others: my parents', my friends’ and, of course by the decade 1959 to 1969, TV’s and radio's many-idiomed and formatted aural-texts. During the period of nearly 70 years, then, from 1943 to 2011 , I have been involved in singalongs in one form or another.

In the years of this 3rd millennium, 2001 to 2011, singalongs using booklets of songs I created took place for the most part at an aged care facility, an Australian government-funded aged care home, called the Ainslie House. This collection of buildings is located beside the Tamar River, an estuary, that runs beside George Town and Low Head in Tasmania. The residents of this home in this the oldest town in Australia, live in a modern and attractive facility about one kilometre from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean at the other end of the world from where I was born and grew to maturity in southern Ontario Canada.

I have been in at least two dozen aged-care buildings in my life.  In the late 1990s I taught aged-care studies at a Technical and Futher Education college in Perth Western Australia. These places, where home--at least in one of the main styles of facility--means living with many other people under one roof, getting used to other people doing some of the everyday things you might have done previously for yourself and by yourself or with your immediate family.  These places for the old and the dieing require a working-out of new balances between one’s need for privacy and the inevitable community nature of such a life.  There are now, of course, an increasing variety of such facilities which this short essay will not attempt to explore in any detail.  Aged-care facilities are slowly becoming an increasingly presence across our civilization as war-babies like myself and baby-boomers all come into their late adulthood(60 to 80) and old agfe(80+) incrementally year after year beginning early in this 3rd millennium.   Any child born in the first year of WW2, that is, in 1939, was seventy-two in 2011.  Aged-care was becoming a vast industry.

So it was that leading singalongs with the very old was, in some ways, a natural event.  By 2011 I was 67 myself, an age of many of the residents of this aged-care facility here in Tasmania. So I was right at home as I sang my songs. I had been a lecturer in aged-care studies programs in which I finished my teaching career in an Australian technical and further education college dealing with students studying aged-care and other specialist training programs in various human services certificate and diploma courses. I became as I had so often before become “an instant expert” in a field I had previously knew very little.  I am now an expert in more and more subjects and know less and less, or so it seems, as the years go on.   The process tends to be the opposite of PhD studies in which one knows more and more about less and less---or so it is often saiud. 

A range of different levels of care as well as specialist services are available here in these buildings, this facility, by the sea under one management and organizational structure: high and low level care, short and long term care, independent unit and shared accommodation, transitional as well as particular and multi-service care are all available under one roof. Care and services such as: respite care, care for particular cultural needs and health conditions, care for end-of-life clients, for war veterans, for the socially and financially disadvantaged, for the mentally-ill and for people living in rural or remote areas.

To a lesser extent I also led singalongs in the years 1999 to 2005 in the Baha’i community.  I had, by 2005, been associated with the Baha'i Faith for six decades.  By 2005 my singalongs with Baha'i groups had ceased but, it was my hope that they would come again into my life in the Baha'i community when and if my health improved.  My final singalongs in classrooms took place as my teaching in FT, PT and volunteer teaching wound down in that same decade. These singalongs became rare events in my last years in Perth Western Australia in large Baha’i communities and the smaller ones in northern Tasmania where I lived after 1999 and in the several classrooms where I taught.  In the first dozen years that I lived in Tasmania during my early retirement, 1999 to 2011, guitar-playing and singalongs slipped to the periphery of my life with one main bastion of activity—and not that often---with the old and dieing.

In some ways it was fitting that the last few years of the singalongs in my life, 2002-2011, involved mostly senior citizens, the aged, old people, those in the last decade of late adulthood(70 to 80) and old age(80++)--here in George Town, as I say above, Australia’s oldest town. I used large-print songbooks published in the UK with a small singing group, choir was not quite the right word, until 2005.  I say “fitting” because the content of these booklets was mainly for the two generations born before WW2--in the first four decades of the twentieth century—the earliest years in Canada and Australia of the activity of the Baha’i community, the religious community I have been associated with for nearly 60 years.  The Baha'i Faith began in Canada in 1898 and in Australia in 1921.

In 2011, though, the material in my two volumes, my two 2-ring binders, that I used for singalongs was for all age groups. There are very few songs that originated in the period, the two generations that were born in the 40 years from 1971 to 2011, circa.  The group born in the years after about 1971, the year I arrived in Australia,  will find few songs that were popular from their years of listening experience in these two binders. I did not listen to the music of those two generations. For the music of some two generations(1971 to 1991 and 1991 to 2011), of a great mass of popular music; for example, the songs of groups like Abba, among a host of others, I never bought the sheet music nor did I learn how to play the songs in some personally inventive way by figuring out the chords. So it was that by 2011 I did not know the songs of those under forty well enough to sing them in groups informally in the Baha’i community or in any other communities of which I was a part as a teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions, as an adult educator, as a quasi-entertainer or one of a number of other roles I have had during those years.

These resources here in these booklets, these files, this collection, are here for singalongs in the groups I am involved with as I head through these middle years years(65 to 75) of late adulthood(60 to 80) and the last years of that stage(75 to 80) and finally, old age(80++), if I last that long.  I have multiple copies of what I have come to call 'the music of other interest groups'--for those not familiar with the Baha’i musical experience, booklets of songs I put together for students in classrooms where I used to teach as well as other groups. I have many editions of song books in multiple copy form that I made for Baha’i groups, as I say, as far back as the late 1980s. Songbooks from the previous two decades, the years 1970 to 1990, and the two decades before that, 1950 to 1970, have all been lost, or they have been thrown away or disappeared into the sands of time, the time that has been my life, as it has slipped irretrievably from my grasp.

These musical experiences called singalongs have returned to my life now here in George Town in recent years, but only on rare occasions.  In July 2008 I put together a package/booklet of 75 songs as requested by the local aged-care centre.  Who knows when and who knows where and how these singalongs will develop in these years of my late adulthood.  In the 18 month period, 1/10 to 6/11, I sang twice at this old-age home.  My wife and son had become more than a little tired of hearing the same old stuff back in the 1980s and 1990s and when I sang at home it was in our spare bedroom with the door shut.   I am not a particularly talented guitarist and it is understandable that my wife and son have got tired of hearing all these old songs, this repertoire of mine.  Singing in groups seemed to become passe, perhaps even to become seen as declasse or lower in social status/standing in the wider society or at least many sectors of the wider society that I came to live and have my being in by the 1990s and 2000s. Of course, this is not true everywhere in the 1000s of cities, towns and hamlets across the planet.

This form of self-entertainment and group entertainment that does not rely on the electronic media is far from dead and I feel it will be part of my life in these years before my demise, my passing from this mortal coil. In some ways it has been fitting, as I say, that most of the singalongs I have been part of in the last ten years, 2001 to 2011, have involved residents of a home for those in aged-care, for people on their last legs. I often thought that American writer William Faulkner's spirit may have been present in those sing alongs. I often thought, too, as I led these old folks in song that the spirit Faulkner had when he wrote his now famous book As I Lay Dieing may just be at the back of the leisure-social-room where we had our singalongs; perhaps this great writer, this winner of a Nobel prize in literature, hangs around the ceiling or occupied another place in these rooms. Perhaps he was outside just by the windows where the poet-historian Arnold Toynbee says we are peopled by the lives, the unseen, unknown, unobserved souls, millions upon billions of souls at just one remove, one step, beyond our senses in a land of lights never to return to this earth, its beauties and its uglinesses, its bitter-sweetnesses and its joys.

These people who now singalong with me from time to time all lay, sat up or palely loitered about, dieing slowly. Each month that I went back to this old-folks home during the latter years of these singalongs someone else had died, sometimes two or three had died or had moved to the very edge of their final hour. Some sat in some state of increased decrepitude to the state I had observed in my previous visit;  some looked brighter and more alert. Sometimes I was brighter and more alert. The term ‘old-folks home’ was what we used to call these places for the old and dieing when I was a kid. And of course it was just that, a home, the last for those who were old. It was their home, their last home on this earthly plane.

Slowly I got to know many of the names of these souls, got to know their life stories, their particular ailments in great detail—as old people are want to tell you to the nth degree of finitude. I also got to know a little of their philosophies and their religious proclivities.   The resources in my personally prepared, tenderly fostered, oft-used-and-repeated booklets of singing material that are here in my files, my collections, are getting a new lease on life. They had often been kept, in this first decade of the 3rd millennium, tightly sealed with a big rubber-band around them, in keeping for a future time when singalongs would once again return to my life.  These singalongs would one day return to the groups I was involved with in these years of my late adulthood and what would become, finally, old age.  The rubber bands are now off and its action-stations for singalongs once again.

Old age begins, say some human development psychologists, at the age of 80.  I've come to like that model since the 1990s when I was a teacher of a psychology course on human development. This model gives me now, as it has given me in the last decade, many more years before the onset of old age.  As things stand now in 2011, I have another 13 years before I'm actually, officially, or shall I say psychologically, in theory at least, de facto, old. And I have plenty of years left, potentially,  for singalongs. Perhaps they may still be in my life in the 2040s, the decade when I become a centenarian. We shall see what those mysterious dispensations of a Watchful Providence provide in this the evening of my life as nightfall gradually approaches and “I go into a hole for those who speak no more,” as that great prophetic Precursor of Baha'u'llah, the Báb, once expressed life's experience of one's final hour so very graphically and so literally in His voluminous writings back in the 1840s.

Ron Price
29/6/10 to 25/6/'11
2000 Words

John Corigliano,  an American composer of classical music, a teacher of music, and a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College in the City University of New York, once wrote that a composer setting out to write a new piece should have “something terribly important to say” —something so important that the music will not be used as background noise, the fate of much music today. The act of composing is a difficult, frustrating process. With few exceptions, this is the message from composers. Although they find the going rough, their greatest satisfaction is in the final product. There is nothing else they prefer doing, and nothing else is like the mystery of the process.  There is much mystery in the process of inspiration. The muse sings for them only by dint of incessant, tedious work, as they remain ever alert to new ideas.  I find this to be true, in part, in the process of writing, creative writing.  Yes, there is a tedious element, but there is much else that is far from tedious. -Ron Price with thanks to Ann McCutchan, The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak about the Creative Process, Oxford University Press, NY, 1999.
----------------------------
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
His War Requiem

Benjamin Britten(1913-1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed prodigious talent from an early age, composing Quatre Chansons françaises for soprano and orchestra at the age of fourteen.  He first came to public attention with a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945 he entered international fame and, for the next fifteen years, he devoted much of his compositional attention to writing operas, several of which now appear regularly on international stages. Britten's interests as a composer were wide-ranging. He produced important music in such varied genres as: orchestral, choral, chamber, instrumental, solo vocal--much of it written for the tenor Peter Pears--as well as film music. He also took a great interest in writing music for child and amateur performers.

Three months before my pioneering-travelling life for the Canadian Baha’i community began at the age of 18 in August 1962, Britten’s War Requiem Opus 66 was premiered for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral on 30 May 1962.  That Cathedral, a 14th century structure, had been destroyed in 1940 in the bombing of WW2. Nine poems of Wilfred Owen, the famed English war poet, were interwoven by tenor and baritone voices into the orchestration.-Ron Price, with thanks to “War Requiem,” in Wikipedia, 22 July 2010.

I knew nothing of you, Benjamin, back then
in ’62 when I was 18 and just trying to get a
high enough mark to become a uni student
and the only youth in another of the Baha’i
communities in which I spent my long life.

Your War Requiem could have been….with
those poems of Wilfred Owen..a very fitting
note for the years and the battles ahead for 
me in my war.....no guns, swords, uniforms
in mine, in a third world war which, as Henry
Miller once wrote would be more destructive
than either of the first two, the ones my father
and grandfather had to fight in the first half of
the 20th century….(1)

(1) The American writer Henry Miller wrote in 1941 that:

“When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete another kind of destruction will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible than the destruction which we are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble.”-See The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p.55.

Ron Price
22 July 2010
------------------------------
DYLAN: 1962 TO 2011

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, has done some considerable digging to write his book, Bob Dylan in America.(1) He has constructed a system of underground tunnels connecting Dylan’s music---his thirty-four studio albums alone, from 1962’s self-titled debut to his 2010 characteristically odd Christmas in the Heart---to a vast range of movements and individuals in American history and culture. Something of Wilentz’s method is suggested by his epigraph, which is taken from Walt Whitman’s “When I Read the Book”: “Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections…” Wilentz sees Dylan’s work as a constellation of hints and clues, and he follows-up on them with an obsessive meticulousness.-Ron Price with thanks to Giles Harvey, “Bob Dylan After the Fall,” New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010.

You first heard that Anthology in 1959(1)
when you were a college dropout and
loitering in the coffee houses around the
University of Minnesota and I had joined
the Baha’i Faith up in Ontario. That was
your first true map of a republic that was
still a hunch. You would not leave it as you
found it and you grew more frustrated with
what you came to see as pious sloganeering
& doctrinaire leftist politics of the folk milieu.

You began writing a kind of visionary nonsense
verse, in which a rough, ribald, lawless America
of the country’s traditional folk music collided
with a surreal ensemble of historical characters
from the Bible, literature, legend and many other
places besides over the next few wild decades.

Those 60s songs were less a place of identifiable
historical record than a superabundant nightmare
from which you were trying, without much success,
to awake.  At moments, to be sure, the contours of
your rancorous social comment seemed to appear
within a rich tapestry of surreal lyrics, & overriding
mood: a combination of dread, confinement, and
nihilistic glee. Your career, began with a motorcycle
accident on 29 July 1966 as I was selling ice-cream
and getting ready to go to teachers’ college. As my
own lows were matched by your eloquent bitterness,
you were trapped inside the aspic of your own sixties
legend and I moved on from Baffin Island to Tasmania.(2)

1 Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), the legendary three double-LP compilation of old-time vernacular songs that in the late fifties and early sixties served as the cornerstone of the folk music revival.
2 Giles Harvey, “Bob Dylan After the Fall,” New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010.

For more of my prose-poems found at various internet sites go to the following links:
http://forums.bellaonline.com/    

hubpages: Poetry Like Music 
(This internet site, entitled Hub Pages, will give readers access to a range of my prose and poetry--if they click on my photo when they access Hub Pages; readers will then have to scroll down to see the several posts I have placed at this internet site)
MuzicForums.com
I have some 50 pieces, some 50 prose-poems, on musical themes, at this internet site, entitled: MuzicForums.com. To access these poems you click on my photo when you get to this site. Then click on the word "Statistics"(in blue letters); then click on the words: "For All Posts By Ron Price." You will then be able to read each piece and some of the comments which have come in from readers at this site. You can also access all my posts at this site by going to the following link:
http://www.muzicforums.com/search

http://bahai-library.com/author Then Type the word Price into the author box