The scholar Plato once said: “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything” (Kania). Plato really said what everyone was and still is thinking about world music, and music in general. When listening to music of all cultures you can hear many different things within it; emotion, culture and imagination. There are many things about different cultures that affect the way that their music is played and performed. In Survey of World Music class, we learned many things about many different cultures that has left an impact on my life and the way that I view world music as a whole. This past summer I was able to go to Kenya with the Malone University Chamber Choir. This was an experience
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When we open our hearts and minds up to music from around the world it helps connect us to people that we might have judged in another interaction. Music breaks barriers, it changed minds, and it moves hearts.
That being said it is important to not listen to world music with an ethnocentric viewpoint. If we go into listening to world music thinking that our own style of music is better, we will never be able to fully enjoy other types of music. When I first came to Malone I had never sung classical music. Since coming to Malone I have done this quite a bit. At first I did not really like classical music all that much, but the more I sang it the more I grew in appreciation for it. I grew to appreciate the composition side of the music, along with the authenticity of the music itself. Ethnocentric viewpoint is where we look at one culture and compare to ours, and think that their culture is “weird” because it is different from ours. (Miller, Shahriari) How close minded we as humans are, the second something is not what we think it should be like we dismiss it. I am very guilty of this, before taking this class and traveling some of the world, I thought that all music that was not American was different and not in a good way. Once I started listening to more cultural music, and really learning about the music and culture itself I started to realize that parts of different cultures played some role in my personal
When we open our hearts and minds up to music from around the world it helps connect us to people that we might have judged in another interaction. Music breaks barriers, it changed minds, and it moves hearts.
That being said it is important to not listen to world music with an ethnocentric viewpoint. If we go into listening to world music thinking that our own style of music is better, we will never be able to fully enjoy other types of music. When I first came to Malone I had never sung classical music. Since coming to Malone I have done this quite a bit. At first I did not really like classical music all that much, but the more I sang it the more I grew in appreciation for it. I grew to appreciate the composition side of the music, along with the authenticity of the music itself. Ethnocentric viewpoint is where we look at one culture and compare to ours, and think that their culture is “weird” because it is different from ours. (Miller, Shahriari) How close minded we as humans are, the second something is not what we think it should be like we dismiss it. I am very guilty of this, before taking this class and traveling some of the world, I thought that all music that was not American was different and not in a good way. Once I started listening to more cultural music, and really learning about the music and culture itself I started to realize that parts of different cultures played some role in my personal