Hear! Hear!

If we're lucky, then what we hear is music.

Music, one of the most powerful emotional art forms created by mankind over the millennia.

It's a strongly sensual experience with a huge capacity to trigger emotion, and possesses a massive number of options ranging from blatancy to subtlety through a range of individual note and pitch renditions, rhythm or tempos, expressed by individuals on the one hand, and large orchestras on the other.

The latter can be disciplined military bands playing strictly regulated renditions, or symphony orchestras often just as strictly regulated but also drifting into a wide range of individual minute variants under the guidance of a conductor, to the performance of, popular music groups such as dance bands, small vocalist backing ensembles , or solo renditions of favoured melodies.

I'll send you a link to a fun-filled example of orchestral conducting at the end of this story.

Each form tugs at the emotional heart strings in one way or another.

So what is the intent of my essay?

It is to raise awareness about the vast range of performance styles in the music that we listen to, and help us become a little more aware of occasional production shortcomings which can unconsciously blemish our perception.

For it is an art medium which can overwhelm appreciation of true quality in performance by its ability to dish up huge amounts of bland material – a sort of aural overkill, and it is this very consequence of which I hope my article will help you stay aware.

I was fortunate to have spent a considerable amount of my career time in recorded music selection to accompany various radio, television and film creative projects which I directed or produced.

I am not a writer nor professional musician, nonetheless a fairly successful applier of mood generating music, possibly aided by my early career as a sound engineer in live and recorded radio broadcasting. .

Like many music lovers, I came from an early childhood of music studies, in my case the piano, and also enjoyed enormously the exposure to orchestral performance during frequent school excursions to learn the structure and functioning of symphony orchestras. To my pleasure, this did not tie me to classical music but prompted the developing of an interest and enjoyment of all styles