Big Picture Stuff: Part 1

When it comes to music, it’s so easy to get lost in the weeds…to become distracted by all the minutiae and trivia… There’s nothing wrong with that, of course…it’s the study of exactly this kind of granular stuff that pays my salary…however, there is a “can’t see the forest for the trees” angle to all this… Sometimes, we need to stand way back—and I mean way back—before some vital things come into focus… I’m not talking about just learning not just to see the trees but the forest, but the whole of the countryside…no, wait…more than that…we need altitude…not just for a 35,000-foot view, but maybe all the way up into geosynchronous orbit so we can assess everything about a certain subject… Wait…this metaphor is getting out of control…what I’m trying to say is that if we step back far enough, we can learn some really interesting things about why music is the way it is…   What you’re about to hear may change the way you think about the history of music…this is big picture stuff—really big stuff—part 1…