My Musical Culture

 Hello everyone, I am Kimberly Leone and I am a senior here at Converse College. While I am not majoring in anything music-related, music is still an important facet of my life. I have many family members who are musicians going back to my great grandparents who opened a music store outside of Chicago. When I was beginning middle school I was required to take a music course as an elective and decided to try strings "just because". I initially wanted to play the violin, (mainly because that was the only string instrument I was familiar with) but my teacher set a viola next to me to try on the first day as we were learning about the different instruments. I ended up falling in love with the sound of the viola and I also really wanted to play the viola since no one else in my class wanted to (*insert your favorite viola joke*). I continued to play the viola through middle school, high school, and I participate in the Converse symphony orchestra when my schedule allows.

1. An example of music that is important to me. 

When I would go over to my grandparents house as a child I would always mess around with the decorations that my grandmother had laying around. In particular, she had these two flowerpots that were motion activated and would start playing a song while the flowers in the pot would spin and dance around. My sister and my cousins all had very distinct memories of this dancing flowerpot, but we never knew the name of the song until we discovered it as teenagers. It turns out this song was "In the Mood" and once we found out the name of the song we immediately added it to our playlists. Everytime I hear this song I thing of my grandmother! She eventually gave us her dancing flower pots to keep as a gift since it was something that was special to us.

2. An example of music that has helped me get through the pandemic. 

During the pandemic, we were required to continue our schoolwork from home. Like most people, I enjoy listening to music, but when I study I have a more difficult time concentrating when there is music with words playing. I also have a difficult time concentrating when orchestral music is playing because I get too wrapped up in enjoying the piece and the technical aspects of the music. When searching for good study playlists I found myself drawn to "lo-fi" music which was a new genre to me. According to the Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia, lo-fi music is characterized by being non-lyrical and primarily composed of a beat. Oftentimes imperfections are intentionally left such as the sound of a vinyl crackle. My favorite "lo-fi" study playlist happens to be a live stream on YouTube by the creator ChilledCow (I have it linked below). This is still my go-to study playlist, plus you get the cute animation to watch!

3. An example of music I don't actually like. 

One genre of music that I do not particularly care for is bluegrass. I'm sure there are plenty of people who thoroughly enjoy listening to bluegrass music, but for me, it all just sounds too similar. I feel like I have too many memories as a kid walking around at church events and there was always bluegrass music playing in the background since there was a group that would offer to play. They were great musicians, but as a kid, I always wondered when they were going to change songs since I had difficulty distinguishing anything different about the tunes. As a result, I have no particular song that comes to mind that I do not care for, rather just the genre of bluegrass itself.