tables turned

We were talking about the future of music the other day with Kevin, then Harrison 

asked if I had a turntable. Therein lies one more brief cautionary tale about the future in general.


My old console stereo, with built-in LP "changer" (called that, I think, because you could pile a stack on the spindle and another record would drop onto the platform in turn as the needle withdrew from each terminal circuit) died while I was still in High School in Missouri in the '70s.


I made do for a time, it was the 8-track era and that's what I listened to in the car. I loved  the chunka-chunka sound of the track switching every three songs. When I think of it I mostly imagine "Magical Mystery Tour" playing as I rolled down I-70 to or from my first college semester at UMSL (U of Mo - St. Louis), in the '72 Dart.

Eventually I bought a nice cheap Technics turntable, which carried me to grad school in Tennessee. I didn't buy many new records; cassettes and the Sony Walkman were big now. And then compact discs.


And then, at some point-- I'm hazy on (or traumatized by) the details, maybe it was in the fog of preliminary exams-- I became convinced that I no more needed that turntable and those LPs and 45s and tapes than I needed an Edsel. 


So I gave 'em away.


Dumb dumb dumb.


Now my music is on a large, neglected stack of CDs, on an iPod, and in the clouds of Sirius and Pandora. I miss my records!


The moral, of course: don't give away your rich, textured (ok, scratchy and hissy) and memory-laden past, in the present, for the unsecured promise of perfection in a shiny but hypothetical future. And don't assume that new and different is always necessarily better. 


But: keep aiming for the stars anyway. 

Postscript. Thank you, Harrison & class, for this wonderful parting gift. It was pressed by Third Man Records in Nashville, whose leader says "people are paying a couple hundred bucks each" on Ebay for this very rare item. Wow.  I'm now officially shopping for my next turntable.

That's the great thing about the future: you don't know what you're gonna get!

Music

Ron Bombardi is a gifted philosopher and teacher, a fearless leader, and a trusted friend. He's also a very talented musician. This Fall he'll teach a course on the philosophy of music. He talked about it on a program broadcast by WMOT Sunday.

This is a hot topic lately. The Library of Congress has been sponsoring a series of lectures on music and the brain. Daniel Levitin says the world sings six (kinds of) songs. Steven Pinker says music is "auditory cheesecake."

Does music connect emotions and concepts? Does it express what concepts cannot? Does it need to be anything more than fun? Lots of intriguing questions here.

The great thing about the soundtracks of our lives is that they can be replayed, but each replaying may bring a new experience. And every new/old song can be thrilling in a unique way.

Besides being intrinsically delightful, music is the perfect metaphor of happiness in general. When William James deplored "the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight," it was the music of life that he feared losing. But happily, he noted, most of us can find the "Play" button again. After suffering the "falling dead of the delight," we rebound: "the music can commence again;—and again and again—at intervals."

One of the things I love about morning is the reliably-recurrent tweeting of our avian companions. Theirs seem less labored than ours. There's a lesson.