Music allows you to be anywhere and yet feel at home.
Associate Professor of Music Anthony Hose directs Stetson’s Orchestra.
This sense of place — sense of belonging — could be something very real, like a geographical location: a village in Russia with songs whose melodies are unique to that village or a tribal community in Africa with drumming patterns characteristic only of that community. But the sense of home could also be very abstract, for music has a capacity to transport you to different often distant communities where you might or might not literally belong. My own experience illustrates this. I have lived in the United States now for some two decades, but I grew up in Central Asia. Uzbek, Afghan and Central-Asian Jewish music were part of my everyday life. I lived with these musical traditions alongside Soviet pop, Russian folk, and Russian and Western art (classical) music. I am at home in all of these cultural communities, and each has shaped me in some way. Obviously, I do not (and cannot) belong to them all, but music gives me access to them — a metaphorical membership, if you like. Through their music, I carry fragments of these communities with me wherever I go. We all do something similar, regardless of our backgrounds or the kinds of music we listen to or perform. Through music, you can also encounter new communities. The secret to such encounters lies in the openness of reception. Mere exposure to musical diversity enriches, and perhaps even strengthens, you and your own community. It is for this reason that I require my students in the Introduction to Western Art Music course to attend a series of classical music concerts on campus. The idea behind this requirement is not only to expose them to the alien repertories that we are studying, nor to make them leave their musical comfort zones, and not even to hear music live, but also to experience all these things communally. Concerts — classical or not — are events during which numerous communities converge. Bridging these distinct communities — musicians, faculty, staff, students, parents, local community members, etc. — is, of course, music. From the perspective of a musician, there is always the urge to make music individually and together and to share that music with others. For the audience member, there is the need to take part in that music-making, to share in it. Temporary and fluid, that concert will end, but the community-forging experience will be taken by us and through us into other communities. Daniil Zavlunov, Ph.D. is assistant professor of music at Stetson. STETSON
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