I Can't Hear the Music

It’s been about a month now, but I’ve got this one incident in my head right now that I’d like to write down before it goes away forever. Normally, it wouldn’t be significant at all—you know, music on college campuses. Now this happening didn’t have to do with marketed music at all. It’s just one day, I walked out of the library, and the usually music-fee campus was alive with this impromptu drumming session.

Of course, it wasn’t impromptu in that some club booked the venue (Sun Yat-sen Plaza, like the small quad on campus), but what was happening was quite fun. Sitting around a coordinator were students on seats playing (percussion) instruments. They were all into it, and it was apparent that they were not all one group, because while the sounds coming out didn’t sound bad, they didn’t sound at the concerto standard either, and would have sounded terrible without the coordinator and the baseline of instruments near her.

In addition, there were empty seats (more than a few), and they all had instruments on them. Granted, they weren’t thousand-dollar pieces, but small hand drums and such. It became more apparent that anyone could join in as random people started sitting down.

So we sat down as well and had some fun banging away at our instruments for like ten minutes. It was more for fun than for meritorious art, so the quality of the actual sounds didn’t matter—it was just fun.

That was just one of a handful (like maybe three) times that I’d heard music blaring on campus. That was the first time I witnessed and participated in an impromptu drumming session as well, and it was a nice relief from class, which I went to immediately after.

So where did the music go?

I’ve heard of Cantopop (or any music for that matter) and I was surprised that the first time I heard it blaring was when I went to karaoke in Causeway Bay about a month and a half ago. In comparison, when I went to Rome, the first thing I heard was American pop blasting out of a storefront across the road from Roma Termini (train station). I heard Italian music coming out of the storefront a block and a half later.

I suppose it would be easy to blame it on the perceived lack of culture here. I don’t think this works though in this case, because even though you might not produce it, you can still enjoy it—I’ve heard my floormates listening to music in their rooms. It can’t be a public space thing, because it’s just constant chatter of students practically shouting over each other on campus. And it’s not like it doesn’t exist at all, because I know that there are plenty of concerts going on around here.

So I guess I don’t really know; I just wish there were more music.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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