Music Wrapped In Plastic

Zrzut ekranu 2016-01-07 (godz. 11.29.53 PM)_edited

According to the major waste disposal trivia website, an average American office worker disposes five hundred plastic cups a year. Furthermore, there are sixty million plastic bottles reaching the landfill every day. The coffee cup that you drank your Latte from this morning will still be in the landfill five hundred years from now.

One may ask about the connection to music.

The society would be my answer.

Music of today's generation quite often presents itself to the society as a monotonous, genetic tune that gets annoying after a while and is eventually forgotten, or...

Disposed like plastic!

The society seems to prefer easily digestible music and the styles of music that have a tendency to change rapidly. An average John Smith listens to music more passively either while driving from work or having a morning coffee.

Music is ever present just like plastic that surrounds us every day. The popular tunes constantly float in the air popping up on YouTube or other social media.

How can John Smith start preserving and recycling music then?

Traditionally, people would socialize through music rather than isolate with Beats on their head and jog away.

I recall my music school director in Opole educating me and all other students on the negative effects of headphones when Walkmans first became popular. Thank you Hubert for your great education that went far beyond music.

Music schools across the world pride themselves on preserving a true value of music and provide not only music education, but an aesthetic value that comes with it. Music schools are extremely crafty in offering music education as a vehicle for transmitting cultural values.

Furthermore, they seek to have a direct and lifelong impact on their students in order to enrich their own lives through music as well as the musical life of the entire community as a whole.

Music schools have a very unique way to bring society together. Through the hallways, studios, recital spaces, people of different age, belief, race, gender, or status become partners.

During recitals or fundraisers students learn to listen critically and have a rare opportunity to be exposed to a wide variety of music, which they might have previously overlooked or avoided. And yet, some students find music education as a lifetime experience, and some, like John Smith might only view it from the practical side.

Therefore, in today's society there are more and more John Smith's cousins to be found. They purchase music lessons for their functionality. One semester of violin appears to John Smith not only as a consumer's product, but also as a golden ticket to a better college, or perhaps to the upper middle class.

John Smith perceives music education more as an investment and a social norm rather that a long term intensive study that is cultivated constantly at music school as well as at home.

Is John Smith and his cousins wrong then?

Not at all.

As in nature balance must exist, so does in music. In order to appreciate a true value of music and start hearing not just listening, one must sometimes experience various kinds of music, even the easily digestible one that is to be forgotten after few months.

Moreover, even if John Smith and his cousins make fifty percent of music school population, some of their views may change within the time.

Once exposed to the music education, they might discover how much fun, how interesting, and how rewarding music is. They may fall in love with it and commit to it forever properly incubating and developing its beauty.

They might as well eventually purchase a stainless steel thermos ( BPA free ) to hold their coffee manifesting care for the environment and not for convenience or practicality. In doing so they surely contribute to saving our landfills and atmosphere from exhaustion and toxicity.

Twinkletoes Music

Dorota Xeller