Who of you has "music" as a hobby?

One of my hobbies is music, but I first want to know, if any of you see "music" as your hobby and in which kinds of music activities you are engaged (like playing an instrument , singing in a choir, teaching music). It also would interest me, if there is a professional musician under us.

Fasulye

Ahem... Had that as a hobby 15 years ago. I was mainly into electronic music.
I have been thinking about taking it up again. More easy to day, you just need a computer and some soft synth.

My old equipment is stored in the attic. Maybe I should have a look at it some day.

I would say that music is my hobby even if I have never been a person who reagulary practises on her instruments. I started playing the guitar at the age of 15 years. As small child I received a melodica form my parents and I dabbled a bit on it. I never had the chance to attend a music school but for my guitar I took some private lessons and I attended 3-4 group courses.

Since 4-5 years I in intervals give private guitar lessons to two adult women, who started as zero beginners. What I teach is playing chords plus singing. The songs we play and sing together are in English and German.

I for myself have also songs in Dutch and Esperanto and once a year I take my guitar with me to an Esperanto - meeting in the Netherlands where I sing Esperanto songs together with a group.

With my Dutch friend I accasionally play together. He plays the recorder and I play either the guitar or the melodica.

My melodica - abilities are all self-taught, mainly as an adult in the past 10 years. It is an easy instrument to learn, much easier than playing the recorder for example.

Fasulye

This thread got me inspired.
I had a look at modern soft synths/musikstudios. Nowadays is so easy, you can even have it on an iPad.
In the old days I used a lot of time to get things to work together.
Before, you had to read a book about something. Now there so many nice video tutorials, I find it more easy to learn from a video.
I think a new project is born

Ps. I do listen to all kinds of music, not only electronic music.

I have no training in music, but I also made electronic music as a hobby for about five or six years. I still have a synthesizer and some software but no longer have any of the hour or so of stuff that I wrote. I uploaded a lot of it at one point, so I guess it is now scattered around the world on the hard drives of the few people who downloaded it, assuming any of them bothered to keep it. I will probably make a few noises now and again once I get a job and have a more regular schedule.

I can play the piano.

Which is your favourite genre? I like very much puccini's operas or Verdi, and on the piano I play Mozart or short pieces by others. I like some pop music as well, Brahms, and Amy Winehouse was great, I love her music. I like more but can't remember all.

I'm a bit of a muso myself. I mostly play the guitar, bass or harmonica, but I have been known to dabble on percussion when I don't know the tune. I also like to sing in my language classes - the students last year all told me I should be on The Voice... which is the one where the judges don't see your face. Not sure whether that was a compliment or not....

Prepare for a long rant, but this is complicated stuff.

I started out playing the recorder around 1960, and later I learnt to play violin, cello and piano reasonably well. I also composed 'classical' music up to the mid seventies, and after a pause took it up again when I happened to meet some people who needed a cellist. The funny thing is that most of these people had more to do with the rock community than with classical amateurs. Then I started to compose music for people from that environment to supplement our supplies from the libraries, and that went for a long time until I lost contact with those people. In the 90s I had to switch to playing with a more mainstream classical amateur orchestra and later in chamber groups, but I found it more and more irritating that they just wanted me to play music by dead people, and then somewhere in the mid 90s I stopped playing, composing and fraternizing with those run-of-the-mill amateur musicians who wouldn't even look at the things I wrote or arranged (and even less write something themselves). After all, in rock circles it is not seen as a crime people try to make their own music, and the kind of people I played with in the 80s had the same attitude. But the average classical amateur musician is apparently scared to death by the mere thought that you could be creative with your hobby instead of just trying to copy the things the professionals play. So I just stopped doing anything active with music , and now I just listen, mostly to classical instrumental music.

Similarly I had stopped painting surrealistic paintings just a few years before because I couldn't stand the stench of turpentine in my one-room flat, and the cultural 'House where I had painted earlier become harder to use when I got a job and had to limit my painting to the evening hours. And seeing the boring junk that fill most of our museums for modern art it is also hard to see how I could fit into that scene. Surrealism is not fashionable among the art buffs.

The loss of these two hobbies was not really filled before I joined HTLAL in 2006 and restarted my language studies. I can't say than my old hobbies had any direct influence on my languages, but the way I study languages has something to do with the way I diverted myself with music and painting. For me the essential thing is to be active and create things instead of just following in the footsteps of some teacher or conductor, and if I can't get that then I just stop being involved. As I did with languages in 1982 when I left the university in Århus with an exam in French and Literature and discovered that I couldn't even find a job as a menial 'undervisningsassistent' (the lowest possible rank among those who teach at a university). Then I dropped any active involvement with languages for 25 years (apart from speaking some of them during travels) - and I only took this interest seriously again from 2006 onwards.

So right now music is for me an absolutely secondary hobby, hovering in a limbo somewhere as something I have been good at and might revive if I could see a good reason. But my experiences with the average classical music amateur in the 90s have left me with an undiluted disgust for that community. If I started to play and compose again I wouldn't tell anybody about it.

A lot of music for movies continue the romantic tradition without being a simple copy of works from the 19. century. Konrogold, who was one of the most prominent composer from the 30s and 40s was in fact a classical composer, who had to flee from Europe and then found a new home in the film industry in California. Other names from the same period like Newman and Max Steiner wrote music of the same kind (Newman's theme from the Bravados is in fact one of the most impressive pieces I ever have heard). And people like John Towner Williams (Starwars, ET) continue the line. However there is not much connection between these composers and the kind of 'avantgardistic' music which the musical establishment sees as the only lawful successor to the romantic tradition. And most of the works from that community is simply unbearable to listen to.

It's confusing and annoying that classical is the name of all the music before now, and that the people think classical = serious = boring = intellectual = snob. also, it's annoying that the music of the preceding centuries was divided in the different names, but it's the same in art. then the people think that if you like the "classical" music then you hate the "modern" one like pop etc.

The most irritating stupid music is the one in the documentaries. I hate it. it is fake, annoying, insulting and must be banned.

Iversen, maybe the professional musicians are less stupid that the amateur ones. I suppose that the professional musicians play all genres, not only by the dead ones.

Have you looked into circumventing musicians altogether with software, such as the Vienna Symphonic Library product ? It is hard to find a succinct and compelling video demo, but here is something,



It's not a real orchestra sound, but I'd gladly listen to your compositions performed thusly. Possibly you could record your own playing mixed alongside your synthetic counterparts and achieve something close to what you envision. Shame that your talent lies dormant. Wish I had musical ability beyond 'noodling' a guitar !

Maybe I should look into that kind of software - but it would be a hellofalot of work to copy all the handwritten notes in a symphony or concert into a digital score. If I did it I would definitely start with some piano or chamber music - like the pieces I wrote for two flutes and cello in the 80s. Some of those things also exist as recordings on oldfashioned cassette tapes, but I don't have the hard- and software that can transfer recordings from an old cassette deck to digital media. It would be easier to scan the scores themselves and put them somewhere on the internet, but I doubt that anybody would be able to read them at sight or spend time on printing them out and play the music. Maybe I'll get time for that when I get on "efterløn" in January 2016 (a Danish kind of bridge between work and retirement), but I'm not too optimistic. Just look what happened when I made videos about my painting: next to nothing. A pure waste of time. Sometimes you just have to admit that it was fun doing something, but it won't make a scratch in the history of mankind. Like learning languages.

Iversen, your You Tube project to show the whole history of your paintings combined with your language skills ended as a sad story (and I felt pity for you) because there was one strategical thinking fault involved. The whole thing is so intense that you would need a group of polyglot / language enthusiast
artists / painters / art historians to watch the whole thing and give you qualified comments.

I thought about it and I couldn't name you any polyglot / language enthusiast on HTLAL who is as well an artist / painter / art historian. In fact you have too different groups of people on the one side the language enthusiast / polyglots and and on the other side the artists / painters / art historians and these groups unfortunatley don't overlap.

For example I have a penfriend in France who is an amateur painter since his retirement and he takes part in expositions. But he only speaks French, so he is not a language enthusiast.

Fasulye

Fasuly, you're wrong.

Iversen's videos were too long, therefoe the people didn't comment because after some minutes they had watched sufficient, and have clicked off. I think that the explanations must be done in one langauge, but Iversen has repeated the Infos in a second one.

I like very much Iveresen's paintings, but I didn't watch the entire videos also. but I find languages extremely important in my life, and I like art, I love architecture, and design as well. Of course many artists, architects and others are interested in the languages and vice versa, but the videos were too long. if Iversen had posted short videos it would be very successful.

I believe you are correct, it appears there is no way to scan a handwritten score into software.

But these compositions are your children and merit attention.

Maybe you could hire someone to do the tedious part of importing the manuscripts into the software? Or delay work on your existing oeuvre for now and begin with new compositions. Do you envision the software as an aid in your compositional process by allowing you to hear the nuances of the changes you make immediately ?

Seems to me those are the risks everybody takes when putting their material "out there".

You're still the guy some of us would like to sit down with to enjoy long and multifaceted conversations. Your impact is not lost. If it was fun for you doing certain things then and now you comment truthfully on the frustrations encountered, seems to me there's some value in that.

As for your music, toiling away in obscurity has been the condition of many composers; if I'm not mistaken the Grove's Dictionary is full of people you've never heard of who wrote music you'll likely never hear. But to paraphrase Edgard Varèse,

"The present day composer refuses to die!"

I hope you too will refuse !

The classical music realm seems to me rather conservative. The composer must acknowledge that even the instruments have a tough time getting past the gate keepers ! The French system bassoon is withering, the Heckelphone remains moribund, these unique and beautiful voices are rarely heard in live performance. Wagner tuba ? Where art thou ?

Occasionally there are glimmers of hope. Benedict Epplesheim in Germany has created a wonderful instrument, the Contraforte, an improvement on the contrabassoon, and this one seems to be making some inroads into the orchestra, a few symphonic players are even insisting that it will replace the contrabassoon. Maybe you could hitch a ride with the ascendent Contraforte by writing pieces featuring it. The aforementioned instruments all have enthusiasts attached to them and the Contraforte is no exception, here's a sample of someone playing the Mozart oboe concerto on the new big horn,




I'm just tossing out ideas. I hope your musical voice won't get drowned out by an indifferent world. Make music for your own satisfaction and if some others find enjoyment from it, all the better.