WHY ABBA

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Published: Tuesday, February 23, 2021 13:31

by John Campbell

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     I listen to very little music now because radio stations are not playing anything that I like. Do not like rap and do not think it is music rather ugly poetry with a drum beat. I guess that if you recited a Shakespeare sonnet real fast and played the drums at the same time it would be classified as music. I still would not like it.  I started piano lessons in the first grade, the violin in the second grade and the tuba in the sixth grade. Stayed with the tuba and received a music scholarship in my junior year by playing "Carnival of Venice" at a state contest. I did not want to be a music teacher so skipped the scholarship and went for chemistry. During my school years there was very little listening time on the radio and most of my music was classical or Church. Later I started to listen to Elvis, Doris Day and most of the bands playing in the fifties and sixties. When I bought a record it was classical, broadway or big band. I never collected the popular music of the day. My favorite classical music was the pipe organ and I had records then cds and now nothing but what I can download on my I-phone and then play them via Bluetooth in my car. I tried the satellite radio but the selections of classical were very slim and repeating what I heard in my younger days did not appeal to me. I had been tuned to music written by the masters and couldn't get used to less than that. Growing up much of the new music was actually taken from classical pieces and I used them to teach my daughters to listen to classical. In the seventies there were four songs taken from the 1812 Overture and "Stranger in Paradise" was taken from the Russian composer Borodin. I played both the classical and the broadway version to convince them that popular music and classical were much more alike than they thought. They wore out some of my LPs after that.