A Summary of Music in My Life

[RonPrice]

INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC AND DANCE FILES

1.1 Music:


Music has played an important part in my life unlike dance which has been, at best, a peripheral experience. In primary school from 1950 to 1957 music was a regular part of the curriculum. My mother and father both played the piano, sang in choirs, had sing-alongs in our home and listened to classical music around the house from the 1950s until my father died in 1965 and my mother and I moved to different houses. In the mid-to-late fifties I became interested in rock and roll, listened to it on the radio in my bedroom and in 1965 bought my first LP: Barry McGuire’s ‘The Eve of Destruction.’ My mother gave me the family copy of The Messiah and these two LPs launched my collection. I purchased LPs and 45s, as they were known, until 1975 by which time I had accumulated some 60 LPs and 45s. In 1975 and the following years I had to scale-back my purchases of records due to having to raise three children.


I started to learn to play the guitar in 1968 after an unsuccessful attempt at classical guitar in 1962/3. I taught music in my role as a primary teacher from 1967 to 1971. In 1989 I taught guitar to a class of Aboriginal students at Thornlie Tafe. I led sing-alongs from 1968 to 1999 when I retired from the teaching profession. In 2000 I joined a small group of singers in George Town to entertain senior citizens at an aged care facility called Ainslie House and I continued with the group until about May of 2005. In 2000 I also had access to some 50 CDs as part of my role of Baha’i radio program presenter on City Park Radio. By April 2005 I had presented about 150 half hour programs and this activity also came to an end that year. Such, in summary, is a brief history of my musical experience.


I have made a list of the pieces of music I have enjoyed most and it can be found in my computer directory, my two-ring binder sing-along file and on the internet. I also have a list of records I own in that same file. This particular music file(now an arch-lever file for popular and two 2-ring binders for classical) contains a list of articles about music, articles I began to save in 1984, but did not begin to save seriously until the year 2000. I opened this file for these articles and resources after twenty years of slowly accumulating the material. It has become a serious collection in the last five/six years in my effort to write poetry and in 2005 I divided it into (a) classical and (b) popular in separate files. In 2006 I opened a jazz section(2.1.B), a sub-section of popular.


I should mention, in closing this introduction, that radio and television have played an important part in my musical experience beginning as far back as about 1950. This is not the place to summarize more than 50 years of radio and television musical influences. I should say, though, that now in these first seven years of my retirement, 1999 to 2006, most of the music I listen to now is from the radio and television. Occasionally I get an LP bug and I listen to classical music on my collection of LPs. One of my aims in these early years of my retirement is to integrate music and the Baha’i Faith in different ways in my poetry and efforts in this direction can be found there.


1.2 Dance:


I 2004 I opened a separate ‘dance’ section in my files. Dance in many ways is but a special form of music, that is music given a special form or expression. These separate subject files are now conjoined with classical/popular music. The Nureyev special which I saw in September of 2004 inspired the creation of this new section of an arts file. Dance really had little part in my personal life: square dancing in 1957/8, the occasional high school dance from 1958 to 1963 and the occasional dance in my four years at university. My first wife, Judy, and my second wife, Chris, and I have done little dancing together, although in my 20s I recall doing some with Judy and occasionally Chris and I went to a dance sponsored by Baha’is. I have done little dancing outside my marriages and none that I can recall in the last two decades, after 1984 when, in Katherine, I attended my last public dance by myself. I have attended, perhaps, two classical ballets and a similar number of modern dance productions in my entire life. I’ve also attended a handful of modern dance productions by Baha’i groups especially in Perth.


Television brought dance into my life for perhaps five years in the 1950s and again for the last thirty years: 1975 to 2005. But I have never found it an engrossing, a particularly pleasurable, art form. At the age of sixty, as I opened up this file of music and dance resources I may find that I will come to appreciate its beauty and form more than I have in the first six decades of my life, but I sense that this will be one aspect of the arts that will play little part in my aesthetic and intellectual experience. I could say more about live dance on stage which I have watched and attended, both inside and outside the Baha’i community, but I shall leave that for now. This opening note is sufficient as an introduction to this file and for posting, when relevant, on the internet.


Ron Price
August 21st 2006.