Ryan's Various Musings on the Musics of Numerous Regions of the World

Welcome back to Ryan's extraordinarily nerdy views on peculiar musical subjects. We have come to my last blog post for this class and I would just like to say I have had a lot of fun writing in this more relaxed conversational genre. Today I will be embarking on a tour of the globe, researching the native musics of various places I find to be intriguing, so come along, it will be a delightfully wild ride.  Ok, the reason behind my researching into this first location is rather bizarre. The tale begins the other day with someone ever so kindly referring to my dog Bailey as a Tasmanian Devil. As you can see here, their appearance is uncannily similar. This led to whole string of events leading to us calling Bailey Hobart after the territory's capital (plus Hobart is a near flawless name for a dog) and me having to take a look at what musical traditions the wonky-whirling-oversized-rodent (actually marsupial) infested island held.    And well..... In my research I found that...

 Welcome back folks to Ryan's musical musings. The subject of today's post is an interview I conducted with my mother, Katie Reynolds, about her musical experiences and opinions. In hindsight I should have gotten more specific with the questions I asked as, though interesting, the points we cover are rather default for a blog post. However I shall do my best to present my findings in an provocative way. So, off we go. But first, since my dog was barking during the interview I thought we should start with a picture of him.  Now that you are in a good mood from that adorable face, time to get down to business. First off I would like to say that I think my mother has influenced my somewhat eclectically old-fashioned music preferences more than anyone else, during the course of my interrogation interview I found this materiality to be very obvious. Step one in the process was reviewing her relationship to music and her background in the field itself. We commenced with a probe int...

  Greetings and salutations fellow music connoisseurs, today the topic of discussion I will be working through is that of music and memory. Now for those of you who are not acquainted with my style of going about the task of explaining various phenomena, I tend to overcomplicate the sum total of my musings on any given topic to an almost vexing degree. But for your sake (and for time's as well) I will try to consolidate my words and thoughts to an acceptable extension. So with without further ado we shall now move along to the reason why we are actually here. In everyday experience we ascertain that there are two distinct sides that music falls into in its regard to that faculty we call memory, either it helps us remember something we desire to associate it with, oftentimes with the use of words ( what I will call intentional memorization) or it occasionally unconsciously slips its way into association with something extramusical through some means of repetition or unique experienc...

  Intro: Hello fellow musicians! For those of you who I have not yet met or do not know well I am Ryan Reynolds a Clarinet Performance and Composition major. I was born in Lynchburg Virginia but have lived in Spartanburg since I was three years old and have been around Converse for various musical endeavors since the 6th grade. I am a commuter student and live at home with my mom, dad, and Sister pictured here.  In addition to music I enjoy running, playing (overly complex) board games, swing dancing and love learning about pretty much anything that falls into the category of nerdiness, particularly in the fields of philosophy, aeronautics and U.S. history. Oddly when I learn more about these very disconnected subjects I always find some useful piece of information that helps my music making.  OK, enough stuff about boring old me. 1. A Piece I like (a lot):  I have been playing music for a long time now and love learning he intricacies of the theory and philosophical...