Understanding & learning to love new musical form, why I had a love of musicals, Letting yourself be open as a person to the new and different in your life..
I suppose it comes as a necessity when you move to a new place. A new town, a new workplace. You have to let go of some things and embrace new ideas, new people, places and ways of being with people. When some types of music have always been a part of your life though, played such significant roles in it sometimes I find it hard to move on. There a strong temptation, maybe even desire to replay, recall, relive, relove those songs that you regard almost as highly as the significant others in your past. Songs about love, lust and life. Songs that made you feel as if you truly belonged, that you were significant ; really significant. Something more than just a collection of carbon atoms, stardust if you want to get all fancy about it.
Sitting in a dark hushed cinema staring at the light. People whispering, a quiet cough. Was it the different reality I liked? Beams of light dancing through celluloid could do this to us all? Is that really all it took to bring us together, to have us all waiting expectantly, our senses, our very conciousness merging? Bournemouth Odeon was where the magic happened. A warm summer in 1966. Mum Dad and I were at the cinema together to see ‘The Sound of Music’. I had no preconceptions or expectations except my Grandma had become unusually animated when telling us about it, that we had to go and see it. The adverts over the curtain rose and I was transported to a land I had never seen before. White snowy mountains, green green meadows and goats on a hillside. Bells tinkling and in the valley far below church bells chiming the hour. And then a glorious musical score swelling up, gathering pace, enveloping you. Wow, I’m getting teary eyed remembering it. What exactly is it that am I remembering that brings such an emotional rush, fully sixty years later?
Of course, all knowing critics will step in here in a rush to explain everything. To expand on the film critique that I took in so avidly when I finally applied to study film production twenty years on. Now I realise that I needed to understand what happened to me (and I discovered so many others) as we sat back as youngsters and watched technicolour magic unfold. How our brains process this information.
By the time I moved to Almeria a few years ago this process was long understood, codified, expanded upon, used, reused, and even crafted in films I had made. I long knew of the significance, the power, the majesty of music fused together with potent imagery. Perhaps I had become even a little blase about the whole process. As Neil Tennant writes, in his three minute piece of perfectly salicious, delicious pop rap, ‘Wet End Girls’
Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what? How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it
If so, how often?
Which do you choose
A hard or soft option?
It was all too commodified, too safe, a pastiche: a stale cream bun with the red, red glace cherry knocked off. What was new or different? Yes I still thrilled to the form but how many times can you watch Jesus Christ Superstar, South Pacific, Oklahoma without feeling that the sweetness was too sweet. Like a spanish gateau from a cheap patiserrie that looks delicious but tastes of nothing but empty sugar calories.
Where was that strange rush I felt as a seven year old as I giddily took in the costumes, the glorious disfunctional yet connected family, the notion that if things got bad you could just burst into a song, dance or waltz your way out of it all. In a thunderstorm? Sing! Put on a puppet show and sing. Dance around a gazebo and sing to your new love. Sing of thoughts, feelings, emotions. You don’t need to lock them all away. Sing and the world will love you, sing and the future becomes so clear. Sing and you can escape the evil in the world. And they all looked like they were having fun. My young self couldn’t possibly articulate it but whilst even he wasn’t naive enough to believe that singing would solve everything, he had just realised that you can escape into a fantasy world for precious moments when the outcome was pre-ordained. You could control things in a way that you couldn’t in real life.
So it was with not a little sense of trepidation that I began to listen in those long lockdown days to new rhythms, the music that was associated with the tempo of Spanish culture. As a hispanophile I realised that I had not touched the culture that oi professed to love, that I had no real understanding of it. I watched quiz programms only to realise that the Spanish had grown up with a range of traditional music sounds and rhythm that was a wotld away from that which I knew. Infused with traditional gypsy rhythms, flamenco, music from the far south, from the New World and that which was home grown in its many poor urban barrios. Music by artists such as Fuel Fandango, Madrid punks like Biznaga and those culled from an urbanista scene coming from the likes of Tomasito along with gay musical poets like Victor Algora with his themes of spanish inner city life well lived. And equally that each had its own blend of imagery, its own rich fusion of styles.
Little by little I gave each of these styles time to filter through my own conciousness, to assemble my own critique of them, without feeling the need to automatically adopt everything simply because it was Hispanic. Equally time to feel that learning to love another culture does not automatically mean removing yourself from all the previous influences that you have been shaped by. Learning to understand that assimilation does not mean losing that part of yourself which you have loved, nurtured and cherished.
Learning that you are now big enough to accept new influences into your life whilst retaining those from the old world. Learning that it is the people who demand that you integrate completely into their culture that are the ones with the closed minds. Learning that sometimes it is you who must educate them, tell them that the world was not made as a place with borders, it is us, the humans who have created them, it is us the humans who have created barriers, it is us, the humans who have closed our mind to ´the other´. It is us, the humans, who must open ourselves up to accepting difference, change, and a shared identity and destiny.
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