World Music

What is Music? - By Jin Woo Park

What is music to you? What genre of music do you enjoy listening to? And how often do you listen to your type of music or anything?

For me, music is one of my most effective motivation when I am living through my days. For us teenagers, there are so many inevitable obstacles and struggles facing us. I spend much of my time in school playing my musical instruments when I am not studying. Not only do play my favorite instruments in school to express musical ideas from some of the classical pieces to jazzy pieces, I expose myself to different genres and types of music. Going to school and coming back home from school, I always have my earphones on and listen to music.

At least for about two to three weeks from now, I will be talking about the types of music that I approach in-school. So the first genre/type is Jazz.

It is just three years ago when I first exposed myself to the musical genre of Jazz. Jazz sounded really odd and awkward to me because I had a negative idea of Jazz. Some of the stereotypical ideas that I had were: “Jazz is so old and boring; only old people enjoy listening and playing jazz” or “Jazz is not suitable for the students like us” and etc. However, when I actually started playing jazz music, I got myself into a whole new world of music. Jazz was definitely not only for some old people and was something that anyone could enjoy. I even got to learn a new instrument—Tenor saxophone—when I started jazz. I am currently in the jazz band in the school I attend. It is part of my important things in my school life.

Music is essential for life for me. As I’ve said earlier in my bio, music is something that all of you should be able to enjoy and like as teenagers. Not only that, music can unite all of us, whoever we are. So why don’t you try to approach many different types of music from today? Don’t just get yourself into pop songs or just one particular genre but try to get into different types of music too! Your daily life might change significantly!