Classics & Sampled Commodities

The first coincidences I had with classical music where on sundays, connected to the smell of freshly baked plaited loaf (or just zopf). I was around 9 years old more or less and the strings and harmonies did not yet talk to me but subconsciously transmitting those unique ways of composing, arranging and creating sound through a magical gathering of different minds and artefacts into my ears.

(this reminds of another adolescence memory: magic – the gathering. I don’t know if the word nerd already existed back in the days but in terms of collecting and playing this card game, I most definitely was one of them..).

However, the first track I consciously listened to to blow my mind in terms of excitement, was de la soul – keepin’ the faith. I can still remember how I was sitting in my brothers bedroom in front of his first personal computer & found this file in one of his many files he would download day-to-day like a maniac, when he wasn’t outside skateboarding or tagging some sweet rubbish on walls and doors in our neighbourhood. When the beat dropped after the short interlude, made out of some dreamy hand organ, I immediately knew that this music and sound would stick with me for the rest of my life. Not particularly hip hop but all kind of sounds, that have that kind of an impact upon my emotion. Like an enchantment, always re-activated and triggered, when part of its spell vibrate through sonic waves into my consciousness. You could say that hip hop was that old pan, I learned my first musical skills with. It already had so many different flavours and origins in it that I could just pick any particular sound or sample I liked and get more into it, find out where it came from, who produced it, re-arranged it or used it to make something different out of it. And then I guess the magic cards nerd and collector in me wasn’t just satisfied with finding out, but had to have a physical proof of the origins of a song. You could call it musical astro traveling, flying through sound waves, always back and forth in time and space, never really reaching a point on the pan’s crater where you’d feel stuck but on a endless journey while creating and leaving your own sound tracks behind.

And now, since a few years & most of all when I began to study music, I get closer and closer to the cultural origins of our western tradition of composing and making music (what some may call classical music). And with this sort of soft adagio I begin to realize all this beauty and complexity and love inside such pieces of music. Like Hilary Hahn performing on one violin but sounding like various linked entities. Or Ravel, one of the masters himself. If one begins to dive into this wide ocean of sound waves, labels and classifications turn into irrelevant categories, dubbed by such magical creations.