Kathryn Brickell Music is proud to offer drum lessons to our students on Long Island. We will be posting informative articles relating to drum instruction and drum lessons.

The following article helps relates music to memory.

We hope you will enjoy your drum lessons with our wonderful, experienced and dedicated local drum teachers.

Music and Memory

It has been suggested elsewhere that playing music regularly or listening to music carefully (also regularly) can help improve or maintain one’s memory.  There is empirical evidence for this claim in the form of hearing tests being done on elderly people who do or do not play an instrument.  But this claim can also be addressed from a theoretical perspective by asking the question, what role does memory play in music?  If we think about this for a second it becomes obvious that memory is crucial to any form of musical expression, not just because performers need to memorize their music if they want to look like they know what they’re doing, but also because imagine listening to a song without memory.  It would just be a bunch of arbitrary sounds.  There would be no development or contrast or any of those things that make music exciting and fun to listen to.  Music requires memory for its existence, which is maybe why keeping it in our lives will help our memory to stick around. 

On a slightly separate note, I’d like you to briefly reconsider the above discussion except replace music with the notion history/the progression of life and arbitrary sounds with arbitrary moments in time and memory with the notion of historical consciousness.

Kathryn Brickell Music is proud to offer violin lessons to our students in NYC. We will be posting informative articles relating to violin instruction and violin lessons.

The following article helps define the term Fantasia.

We hope you will enjoy your violin lessons with our wonderful, experienced and dedicated local violin teachers.

Fantasia

Fantasia is the Italian word for “Fantasy,” which is a type of musical composition in which the compositional whims or demands of a composer’s imagination take precedence over the dictates of any particular musical form.  This means that the Fantasy is sort of the musical form that lacks any musical form, or a musical form whose essence is pure, irreducible, undiluted, capital ‘I’ Imagination.  Fantasy is often the name given to compositions for which a composer can think of no other name.  Some composers even go so far as to hold that the Fantasy is strictly an improvisational style of composition, which, by nature, defies notation.  Rousseau defines the form (or anti-form?) as “a piece…that one performs as one composes it,” and adds that “as soon as it is written or repeated it ceases to be a Fantas[y], and becomes an ordinary piece.”  This is perhaps an overly dramatic opinion seeing as such great composers as Mozart, Bach, Schuman, Brahms, Schubert, (and the list goes on!) have left us written pieces bearing the title of Fantasy.