Confessions Of A Real Life Linus

How I Discovered Music

I grew up in sunny Southern California, first living in South Pasadena and then, at around the age of five, we moved to La Canada. This was originally a little hamlet tucked into the foothills next to Pasadena, before they put the 210 freeway through.

At that time, La Canada was a very rural place and, to me, actually quite magical. There were large groves of Oak trees and a wilderness sort of park next to a swamp, which was bordered by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, or JPL.

It was here that I discovered my intense love of nature, spending countless hours romping through the park or the foothills. I was infamous for carrying about live creatures in my pocket; a legless lizard, a turtle or a frog or two. I would always ask whatever hapless adult neighbor I saw if they wanted to see ‘my critter.’ In the spring, when the tadpoles hatched at the park, my friends and I would carry buckets full of frogs back home. The park has now, alas, become a frisbee golf course and the swamp has been drained.

I was an early reader and had decided that Dick and Jane had no discernable literary motives and had begun to read the works of Jules Verne and Mark Twain.

My father also had a rather neglected record collection, consisting of a mixed bag of classics to popular things like Herb Alfred And The Tijuana Brass. I was actually the only one who ever played the records and, one eventful day, I picked out a record quite randomly. It was in a very plain green album cover and the company was Angel Records.

Well, this happened to be a recording of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony and, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s called The Pastorale because each movement depicts a different scene in nature.

This was a transcendental experience for me. I didn’t need to read the record notes to know what this music was about and this started my long standing love of the classics, Beethoven in particular, since we were kindred souls in our deep love of nature.

Comments

Learn Music

You Can Learn Music Perhaps you’ve gone to a concert and fantasized about being able to ‘shred’ on a guitar, like the lead guitarist you were listening to. Or maybe you were listening to some artist on the piano and you wished that you could play the piano like that. What usually holds the average person back is what I call the ‘myths’ that abound in and around music. They mostly exist around learning music, since anyone who has succeeded in mastering an instrument has learned the falsehood of these myths. One of the most prevalent myths is that you need to have ‘talent’ to play an instrument and, if you don’t, well, just forget about it. The other very prevalent myth is that you need great sacrifice and must spend years and many hours a day to learn an instrument. The third thing that really messes people up is tying into some really bad teaching ideas. What do I mean by this? Well, learning an instrument is really no different than learning any other sort of skill. I like to compare...

Mother/Short Story Excerpt

Mother Ian adjusted his field glasses and looked out at the arid wasteland that started just under his chin and stretched out to the horizon. Behind him the jungle stopped abruptly as if something had taken a great chunk out of the Home World, leaving the white sand dropping away and turning to ochre as it approached the horizon under the setting sunlight. Behind him there were bird calls, in front of him only the occasional sizzle of sand running downwards. It wasn’t natural, something had created it and Ian kept wondering what it was. He was pretty certain that there was a deep crater or canyon out there in the middle of this desert as you would see plumes of dust rising vertically once in a while, but it was impossible to say if this was a sign of Others or just air currents kicking up. There was no going out there to see though, as the desert was still one of the many Forbidden...

Musical Trends And Composers Who Ignored Them

Composers Who Ignored Musical Trends When we think about the concept of musical trends we think of our present age since we have a vast media that keeps us up to date with the latest musical trend. Billboard and social media keep us up to date on what the latest trends are. It's interesting that musical trends apparently existed as far back as the sixteen hundreds. This is when the composer J. S. Bach lived and wrote music and in his day and age the musical public was mad for Italian opera. This is traced in an interesting article on Facebook called Musical Context in Bach's Era. Bach did not follow this trend but wrote his own style of music which was a complex sort of music involving counterpoint which is the play between melodies. He also made reforms in the musical tuning system which paved the way for later composers such as Beethoven and Mozart to create the highly expressive music that they did. We find at a later time Mozart running into a similar thing when he wanted...

Writings of Brian Lee Beshore

Search This Blog