The Music Is the Same

I have concluded that I see music in my own unique way.

I have repeated again and again that I am not musical. So when I go see an opera, I can't comment on the musical side--only on what I get from the music. Sometimes when I tell people that I go to the opera, I also end up mentioning that I never listen to opera (never might be too strong a word--I have a couple of times and I might listen to a song from an opera by an artist I follow, but that's quite different). It's also difficult to try and describe what music I do listen to. And that music varies depending on the time and season.

Right now I have been getting into writing again. Writing music, well, often the more agitating it is, the better. I've been using Spotify a lot lately, letting it just play random things. So I was listening to some sort of rock or metal song or other (possibly "What I Am" by Crown the Empire) and I realized something (I might also add here that it's mainly the things without screaming that I'll listen to). I realized that I was getting the same thing from that song I'd been getting from the Countess's song in The Marriage of Figaro in March. Opera and a touch of metal? They're all the same to me sometimes.

I don't see music the way most people do, I think.

I see in the emotional tone of a thing. A song. A person, even. That's the word I use; I say that I don't remember what people look like, I remember their tone. What they feel like, the sense of them. So that's how I see music. And it's those intense things of emotion that I like best when it comes to art--so that's why I might go see an opera and then sit at my desk listening to Breaking Benjamin.

(Not, though, I might add, to say that I don't see the music aspect at all. There are definitely sounds that I don't like. I don't like soul or jazz or hip-hop or plenty of things--in general.)

What kind of music do you think John Keats would have listened to if he were alive today, if he had been born in, say, 1999? I doubt he would've been an operagoer. Though, then again, he did like Classical imagery, so maybe him enjoying opera today would have been similar to him hearkening back to Classical characters and images. But Keats himself was part of a newer movement of art and while there is modern opera, mostly the genre is associated with pieces that are already in existence. So who knows.