Hello, all! My name is Lydia and I am a Music Therapy major and violinist. Like many people, music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. While my parents don’t consider themselves musical (I think the music therapy student in me would disagree with their assertion on that), there was always music playing in our house: James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, Journey, Jim Croce and several Broadway musicals were all big in our house.
I think my grandfather was listening to the Brahms Violin Concerto when I first really heard the violin and I was immediately obsessed. I loved everything about this instrument and knew I wanted to play it. I think I was around 5 years old. I was finally able to start violin lessons three years later (three years is an eternity for a kid) and I haven’t looked back since. In the intervening years I picked up several other instruments and went to college (the first time) for Music Theory. Then I got married, moved to Germany for a couple years then around the eastern United States, had a couple kids, and now I’m back at school to become a music therapist.
Currently I have been enjoying the band The Arcadian Wild. I love their instrumentation (folksy acoustic instruments like guitar, fiddle, and mandolin), orchestration that includes a lot of intricate, interesting fingerpicking of the plucked instruments, and I am a sucker for music that has a fiddle/violin.
Most of their music also has words, but this piece is so fun and really shows off what I really love about them, which is their arrangements:
And a bonus, just because it’s fun:
For the past few years Anais Mitchell’s music has been deeply important to me. After I left college 10 years ago we moved around a lot and had young kids. Over the course of a decade, in the throes of parenthood, with a spouse in the military who deployed twice (and the pandemic began in the middle of the second deployment), I started to lose touch with myself. By the time I was auditioning here, although I had known for several years that I wanted to do music therapy, I also kind of thought that I maybe didn’t really have a connection to music anymore. Then I heard Anais Mitchell’s song Tailor and it resonated so deeply with me that I fully wept every time I listened to it for over a month.
In this song she sings about someone who said he liked [insert trait here] and so she became that thing, then this person left and she doesn’t know who she is anymore without someone to tell her. The second half of the song (to me) speaks to the beginning of her journey to rediscover who she is.
To me, Anais Mitchell’s music sound the way reading poetry feels. I might get an impression of something the first time, but I’m still kinda confused and maybe I don’t quite get it? Then I listen a second and a third and a fourth time and I find it deeply moving and beautiful. She isn’t an artist for everyone (my husband, specifically, does not like her voice), and my feelings are not hurt if her music doesn’t connect with someone, but she is, unequivocally, my favorite artist:
Another song of hers that I love is Watershed, which just came out last year. The lyrics of this song use the imagery of hiking to speak to a journey of resilience and persistence, in which one both looks into the past to see how far they have come and looks forward to work toward a goal.
The tallest summit you look up to
Someday it’s gonna look small to you
…
How the heights on which your heart was set
That you won so hard and lost so fast
Are now, somehow, just silhouettes
On the morning of my junior recital in the spring I listened to this song the whole drive to campus. I thought about all the work I had put in and was reminded that, while I still have a ways to go, I am now at a point that I could not have even imagined a couple of years ago.
Some music that I don’t connect to is anything by Hank Williams Sr. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the music itself and I can see why people like it. My husband is one person who loves Hank Williams. My biggest issue is that I cannot stand his voice. There’s something about the timbre of his voice that sets me on edge and I can’t enjoy the music he created because of it.
I’d like to end with another piece I’ve been enjoying recently. This is Fantasie in G minor, composed by Florence Price. It’s a really fun piece that I’m currently working on for my senior recital this year:
I quite liked the song you posted from The Arcadian Wild. It is something I think I could get lost in. I understand what you mean about Hank Williams Sr.'s timbre. It is very off putting.
Hi Lydia. I can agree that music is very good in times of desolation especially after moving. It's cool that that's what inspired you to be a music therapy major. Also the Arcadian Wild song goes hard. I love the violin and mandolin parts the best.
I have so many thoughts when it comes to the intersection of music and gender; almost like a spiderweb, where each thought connects to a network of other thoughts and one vibrations reverberates through the whole web. My first thought may seem like a non sequitur, but stick with me for a moment: I think about the relationship between women and arts at large and how it is viewed by society. It is common for the visual arts that are traditionally associated with women (sewing, quilting, embroidery, knitting, crochet, etc) to be placed under the category of “craft” whereas other forms of art, those that are more traditionally acceptable for any gender, are placed under the category of art. I wonder if the difference is that some of these crafts come from necessary everyday tasks (making and mending clothes, etc) that were made beautiful by those who were doing them. Maybe because there was an expectation that these things would get done, and that they would be done well, then they we...
As I was thinking about this post I realized that the rituals that I am most familiar with are primarily religious in nature. I spent most of my life attending church regularly, first a Catholic church and then protestant nondenominational churches. In both settings music is used every week through the services. There is often music playing before the service, and music to call the congregation’s attention to the altar, and music to sing together, and music to close the service. I rarely, if ever, go to church anymore due to a number of reasons that I am, honestly, unwilling to go into. I also rarely, if ever, listen to the music of the church anymore, but I heard and played so much of the music that I can still recall nearly every lyric to a large number of both hymns and more contemporary worship songs to this day. And so I am struck by how influential and meaningful the music of rituals can be. This past week was the anniversary of my uncle’s death and, while I was ...
I quite liked the song you posted from The Arcadian Wild. It is something I think I could get lost in. I understand what you mean about Hank Williams Sr.'s timbre. It is very off putting.
ReplyDeleteI liked the song stan the man. I never heard this song until now but I enjoyed it a lot.
ReplyDeleteHi Lydia. I can agree that music is very good in times of desolation especially after moving. It's cool that that's what inspired you to be a music therapy major. Also the Arcadian Wild song goes hard. I love the violin and mandolin parts the best.
ReplyDelete