Festival season has begun. We’ve seen spot prawns served multiple ways, we drank tea in Oak Bay, we entertained our guests at the Sooke River Bluegrass and Vancouver Island Cultural festivals, the Aboriginal Cultural Festival wraps today, and the Foodie Film Fest has just started making us drool. And, for the next week, Victoria’s International Jazz Festival will be bringing jazz lovers together.
So many of the big events during the summer here and elsewhere include music—as the events’ focus, part of the line-up, or a contrapuntal offering. These events are community occasions. They bring people from across the region together to share an experience.
Music stitches together our social fabric in many ways. Those who enjoy bluegrass or ska or funk or even the Grateful Dead share a common language within their genre. Fans of certain bands form their own insular groups, sometimes following the musicians’ performances, travels and lives online or in person in a way that borders on stalking. And, yes, whenever strangers gather to listen to the same music, they bop their heads to the beat, tap their fingers, and swing their feet to the rhythm, in time, together.
And it turns out, when music plays, we share the experience of melody, harmony and rhythm at a much more basic, personal level….
Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….
