I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.
I listen to old jazz and classical music, and that's it.
I don't much listen to music as I study it: who's doing what, who wrote it.
I really don't know anything about music. I don't really listen to it. I don't know anything about the history of music.
My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
I don't know anything about the history of music.
Alan [Lomax] and his father started off changing the definition of folk music from something ancient and anonymous to something very contemporary.
Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history.
When I was at the Group for Musical Research, with this idea of discovering electronic music, I quickly realized that that it was a very interesting and exciting approach to music, but I also saw that it was very intellectual and quite dogmatic.
If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that's existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.
I was interested in both Western and Indian classical music.
I actually don't like playing the piano or conducting the orchestra.
The first half of 'Book Reports' deals with the history of popular music and rock criticism. When I hooked all those historical pieces together, building on the minstrelsy piece, it became my history of popular music.
I'm into old-time music; I'm not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I'm really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I'm always dying of curiosity to see what they look like. So there's some connection between visual images and music.
I was always looking for evidence of these common musical roots, but I was too young to know that what I was doing was called ethnomusicology.
My kids will come to me and ask me to listen to a 'new sound' they think they've discovered. One time it was the Beatles' 'Yesterday,' and the new sound was four strings. All of a sudden the new generation discovers the string quartet!
In Berkley, they have academic studies on all genres of music including rock and jazz, but in India, we don't have serious academic research and studies on film music; it is such an interesting area of study.
I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.
My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.
I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.
I think connecting natural elements and musicology is probably pretty idiosyncratic of me, so it is hard to imagine anyone else going down that route.
I love every kind of music.
Listening to music for me is like homework. Music will give me enjoyment, but as soon as it's giving me that enjoyment, I want to analyse it, and then it becomes work. Why does it sound like that? How?... then I dissect it.
My father was working on his Ph.D. on Danish choral music - the Danish choral music of Carl Nielsen - so over there to do research.
