About a week ago, I started reading a book about George Gershwin (Howard Pollack's George Gershwin: His Life and Work). In Chapter Four (The Popular Pianist), Pollack briefly talks about the geographical distance between different musical types: "The emergence of Harlem stride piano during World War I ran parallel - geographically as well as temporally - to the rise of jazz. Whereas jazz emerged largely along the Mississippi from New Orleans to Chicago, Harlem stride traveled a similar course along the eastern seaboard, from the coastal Southeast to New York." This got me thinking about the geographical nature of music, and I realized that music isn't tied to geography for me, either as a musician or as a listener.
As Pollack later illustrates in that chapter, there were more musical differences among various locations in Gershwin's time. In a word, things were more insular. As far as my own experience, I don't think that insularity is really the case anymore (at least not in some senses). Partially because the internet has made communication among distant locations virtually instantaneous and therefore has made obscure styles easier to find (by circumventing geographical borders), but mostly because I'm not a part of a local music culture. I have a long-standing disdain for where I live, so I wouldn't want to be a part of whatever local culture there is anyway. In any case, the musical styles that I'm interested in as far as being a musician aren't limited by what I hear around me. Because of recorded music, I can listen to music that's varied by time period in addition to music that's varied by geography.
Pollack's mentioning the geography of music also made me realize that I'm not part of a geographical musical sphere even as a listener. For a year and a half, I've been keeping track of what I listen to, and in all of that time, I've gone to only one live performance. I think that in my whole life I've gone to only two concerts that weren't high school band concerts. For me, music doesn't really exist as a live medium; recordings take precedence for me, which - interestingly - is exactly the opposite of how things were about a hundred years ago. Back then, recordings were a rarity; music was a live medium only (radio broadcasts may have started to creep in, but they were still live performances).
To be clear, my avoidance of live music isn't for the sake of avoiding live music; it's all of the things that have become associated with that live music that I dislike: I don't like having to stand for two hours while at a concert; I don't like having to be among people who talk through the concert and smoke cigarettes and drink beer; I don't like being distracted by people's coughing and whatever other noises they produce (I hate the sound of clapping). For me, those things get in the way of the music too much to make live events worth attending. I'd much rather just put on headphones and listen to a recording. Then almost nothing can get between my ears and the actual music.
