Lecturer in Music, Classical Guitar, Princeton University<\/em> \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n What is the tempo and affect of the blues?\u00a0 Who dances a square dance or clogs and what are they wearing?\u00a0 Where are they dancing?\u00a0 If you are a U.S. citizen or resident, these questions probably evoke vivid images of the people who perform or dance to the music associated with these questions.\u00a0 You know the general mood of the performances, the socio-economic status of the participants, the likely geographic area where this music or dance might have originated, what it looks like, even what it feels like.\u00a0 You may have even played the music and danced the dances yourself.\u00a0 In other words, you are intimately familiar with the cultural context of the music and what it expresses.\u00a0 It has a cultural meaning to you that is profound and almost instinctive.\u00a0 It would be hard for you to play it in a way that was totally out of character because you would find the result to be inexpressive and unsatisfying.<\/p>\n Classical music players are faced with a particular and difficult challenge in that they typically must interpret music that is recorded only in print.\u00a0 The creator writes the sound in notation so that it can be reasonably accurately reproduced by instrumentalist in any place at any time, which could mean a place very far away or a time in the distant future.\u00a0 The re-creative artist, being the player, may have little or no sense of the cultural context of the music he or she is playing.\u00a0 Of course, this is why music schools offer so many courses in music history and performance practice and this is what keeps musicologists in business.<\/p>\n Even with the best music education, it is still extremely difficult to imagine a cultural context from the distant past or from a foreign country.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t mean you shouldn\u2019t make every effort to try, and YouTube, dance experience, and travel can help you succeed.<\/p>\n In this day and age we now have the 24\/7 cultural encyclopedia known as YouTube, where you can see practically any kind of music being performed or danced.\u00a0 It can be invaluable to see a dance performed to music you might be studying, to see all of the contextual aspects mentioned above, i.e. tempo, mood, affect and place.\u00a0 For example, much music played on classical guitar comes from Latin America, an area of the world few residents of North America and even fewer Europeans have visited.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this fact is often reflected in peculiar and uncharacteristic interpretations of music from Latin America on the guitar.\u00a0 However, YouTube is a pretty good resource for researching the roots of music from this region since much of the Latin American music composed for guitar is relatively new and related closely to the contemporary cultures of countries in Latin America.\u00a0 There is a lot of video and audio information about this highly relevant and recent cultural history available on YouTube.<\/p>\n Aside from YouTube, what are some other ways to study cultural context outside of music school?\u00a0 What about dance lessons?\u00a0 It is a great way to learn how to play a huge amount of music (waltz, minuet, mazurka, samba, tango, etc.).\u00a0 When you actually have to move every part of your body to a type of music you quickly learn the limits of tempo, the stresses of the measures that are reflected in the steps and the mood of the dance.<\/p>\n Of course, the best way to learn cultural context is to travel, if you are lucky enough.\u00a0 It could and probably should be more of a priority for a young musician, because in a matter of hours spent in a distant and foreign land, you can learn more about cultural context than you can in years of study from afar.\u00a0 You can even learn a lot about music of antiquity by visiting the places of its origin, because some of its original context remains in buildings, language, food and social attitudes.\u00a0 You can learn a lot just from the climate and the physical appearance of a place. For example, an excellent opportunity exists for experiencing the cultural context of some of our greatest renaissance and baroque music at the Lanciano International Guitar Seminar<\/a> in Italy, which takes place in and around buildings and castles dating back to the Roman empire.\u00a0 The city is steeped in the culture of some of history\u2019s greatest music<\/p>\n Once you understand the profound importance of cultural context in the performance of composed music, you will have a new and more informed approach to all of your musical studies and a much more rich experience of the music you play and perform.<\/p>\n Our Guest Blogger, Laua Oltman, is also actively involved in these institutions and activities.<\/em><\/p>\n Classical Guitar Instructor, Lafayette College<\/em> Written by Guest Blogger Laura Oltman: Lecturer in Music, Classical Guitar, Princeton University Co-Artistic Director, Lanciano International Guitar Seminar (www.lancianoguitar.com) \u00a0 What is the tempo and affect of the blues?\u00a0 Who dances a square dance or clogs and what are they wearing?\u00a0 Where are they dancing?\u00a0 If you are a U.S. citizen or resident, these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2625"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3673,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2625\/revisions\/3673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n Co-Artistic Director, Lanciano International Guitar Seminar (www.lancianoguitar.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Lanciano](\"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/SCENERY-COMBINED.jpg\" "\\"Lanciano")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Lanciano](\"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/CASTLEnMAPCOMBINE.jpg\" "\\"Lanciano")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n Co-Founding Director, New York Guitar Seminar at Mannes (www.mannesguitar.com<\/a>)<\/em>
\n Co-Founding Director, Raritan River Music (www.raritanrivermusic.org<\/a>)<\/em>
\n Laura and partner, Michael Newman, perform as The Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo (www.guitarduo.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"