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Postscript: I wrote the following about ten years ago, and it still rings true. (Except perhaps for the part about cheap airline travel.) Though I now keep my music diary in the form of iTunes playlists, music is still a reliable source of joy, for which I am deeply grateful.
I'm sorry if I've disappointed anyone hoping for downloadable music, but it's all just me blathering about music. I'm not comfortable posting other people's work on the web, so now you know how old I am. ;-) Hopefully the pointers will be of interest to some, as they have been before.
Enjoy! -- Lauren
An awful lot is going wrong in the world now. Pressures from both population and technology contribute to that. But population and technology also contribute to something more wonderful than ever before:
An underappreciated consequence of six billion people on the planet is that more raw musical talent is now born daily than ever before. (After all, it's selected for.)
And thanks chiefly to two technologies of the late, unlamented twentieth --
-- the amount and variety of music available to us is unprecedented.
In this singular glorious way, we are richer than emperors.
Because of cheap air travel and digital boxes, music from anywhere is available nearly everywhere else. Listeners lap it up. Musicians get ideas, then airplane tickets:
A bluesman from rural Louisiana plays with a virtuoso throat-singer from the Mongolian steppes,
a Celtic diva sings with musicians from Morocco,
a singer and multi-instrumentalist from Africa works with a Bulgarian women's choir.
They absorb each other's musical traditions:
Young American musicians get curious about klezmer and gypsy,
women from Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey blend their splendid and unique voices,
the Red Star Army chorus sing rock-n-roll with the Finns.
Like the Florentine Renaissance, the result is one of history's creative outbursts.
We live on one little segment of human history's long line. A lot is going wrong at the moment. It's awfully easy to focus on that. So don't forget: there's always one good reason to love living right now.