listening to music like it’s a Disneyland ride
My decision to go with traditional music for my “listen around the world” is shaping up to be a great decision especially because I’m also reading a book of essays on disneylands cultural impact and it is feeding into my mode of listening (I was already beginning to go in this direction but the book affirms my inklings)
It’s one of those books that drops a nugget of important insight with every sentence and there is no time wasted debating a point to death because they know you know exactly what they’re talking about.
I read about how Walt Disney grew up a poor working boy in Missouri and how his happiest times were spent in storybooks — in his imagination of other worlds and how Disneyland was made to be this hyperrealistic 4d experience of other worlds
Hyperrealistic because they take your clichéd understandings of a time and place and beautify it, stylize it, edit it to match your expectations so that the experience will be the same as you remember, if you have ever gone to that place. OR, in my own opinion, it colors the way you make new memories. I went to Disneyland before I’ve been anywhere and everything I see reminds me of Disneyland. My memories are formed in a stylized Disneyland shape
And how, I began to realize this too and was writing about this in my last post, each ride puts you as the protagonist in a story.
The book puts Disneyland in the same category of experience as books and films in that they bring you into a different world.
It’s a living dream.
A beautiful realm
And with my traditional music I am now trying to imagine myself in a different place and time when I listen to a new song
It’s a completely different experience
When I listen to modern music I am trying to see if I like it or not and I usually do not like it
But with traditional music (most of which has that Disney effect too because how can they know what music 1400 years ago sounded like? They are reconstructing…) I am closing my eyes and seeing what images come to me
So each song becomes a theme park ride.
Each song puts me as the protagonist in a story in a different place and time
There is a Chinese piece which I adore. It’s called the joy of drinking wine.
It is trippy and it a regal and it is grand and majestic and it makes me feel like I’m a Chinese princess enjoying a court festivity for my father the emperor’s birthday party and I’m sitting there listening to this music and watching people dance and I’m imagining myself underwater (because that’s how the music itself makes me feel)
Nigerian drums make me feel I’m getting ready to go hunting
Swiss music makes me feel well, like I’m sort of back at Disneyland to be honest because it sounds exactly like the type of thing they play at the Matterhorn.
I’ve never listened to music in this way. In this books and film way of using my imagination to see actual images and scenes and stories in my mind