I remember when I started to study the history of music, I did not realize what I was getting into. I had a notion that music history was like a trivial pursuit. Honestly, I only took my history of classical music class because I needed the credits. I did not realize how fully interesting music history is. You see, in our culture a lot of us do not truly study to comprehend music. For much of the world, music is a language, but for us it is something that we consumed passively. When I began to study about the history of Western music, though, it changed all that for me. I have had some experience playing musical instruments, but I have never mastered one enough to really understand what music is all about. This class showed me.

When a lot of us think about the music history, we think of the history of rock music. We suppose that the history is plain because the music is plain. Actually, neither is the case. The history of music, whether you mean classical music, rock music, jazz music, or any other kind, is always complex. New chord structures are set up carrying with them new ways of comprehending humanity. New rhythmic patterns are introduced, bringing with them new ways of understanding time. And music shows all of it.

Even when the class was finished, I would not stop learning about the history of music. It had whetted my appetite, and I wanted more. I searched for all the music history volumes that I could locate. I even began to explore forms of music that had not interested me before in the hopes of improving my musical knowledge further. Although I was in school studying toward a very different subject – a degree in engineering – I had thought about giving it up and going back to get a degree in musicology. That is how much I am enthralled by the issue. If you never took a course in the history of music, you don’t realize what you are missing out on. The CDs will never sound the same to you again. The whole thing will sound a lot more rich, a lot more shinny, and much more significant. A new song can reflect a new way of being, and a new way of imagining life in the world. This is what learning about the history of music would do to a lot of us.

If your occupation is musician, sooner or later you will have to work into something kind of humiliating in order to pay the bills. A lot of musicians play for weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, or graduation and birthday parties. Others create songs for commercials and soundtracks. In my case, I am able to pay the bills working in a cover group.

It is tougher than you might imagine. You have to be on top of the tastes of the bar crowd, and that can be painful. At first, I really ignore how to stay up to date. I looked at the top 40 songs charts, figuring that that would be the best method to know what was in and what was not.