Hi, Richard! Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

The war pipes... i.e. the kind others think of when they
think of bagpipes... were *supposed* to scare the heck
out of the enemy. They sound nice from a few miles away,
though, if one is not in any danger.... :-)

RIght, but when they're oming close they make quite a
noise <grin>.

Uh-huh. And if a student asks you to help him tune his drones you do *not* want to do it in a small practice room. I made that mistake once, when I
was young & foolish. I won't do it again.... :-)))

So as a band teacher I estimated the average age of the
parents in the audience & did a number at every concert
which was popular when they were teenagers. ;-)

GOod plan. Makes the parents feel better too when they
hear something they recognize <grin>.

Agreed. I imagine you've used the same principle in your own work...
and I've noticed the conductor of our community band doing it as well. We play
at a lot of nursing homes where the age of the audience is fairly predictable &
we use a book of folk songs, hymns, light classics etc. in our warmup. Chances
are the "older" crowd will recognize at least one of any three numbers.... :-)

ONe thing that helped me was the older kids at the
school for the blind, where ad hoc combos of musicians
were as ubiquitous as sandlot baseball among
neighborhood sighted kids.

Meanwhile Dallas & I... being, as it were, neither fish
nor fowl... spent much of our time soaking up anything
we could find which had printing on it. Yet IMHO we were
all honing the skills we'd need in our adult lives. :-)

YEp, hopefully will never quit "honing my skills."

Glad to hear it.... :-)

In retrospect I'd say the music which grabbed my
attention at the same age differed a bit... but not too
much... from what I was used to.

rIght, but there again my cultural frames of reference
were all over the map, thanks to residential school with
kids from all sorts of backgrounds.

Ah... thanks for the clarification! I wasn't sure in which order you
attended which school because I've known various people who for various reasons
transferred to a more specialized environment later. At residential school you
would indeed encounter a variety of kids, and you'd also have an opportunity to
get to know them in a way you wouldn't if everyone was returning home at night.
One of the things I appreciate about the schools I went to is the socioeconomic
mix I found there. Although I didn't have the same opportunity you did to join
ad hoc combos, I learned to get along with people from various walks of life...
and I learned that they tend to have different tastes in music. My only regret
is that figuring out what works for me took so many years because the classical
snobs & those of decidedly more plebian tastes occupied so much bandwidth. :-/

now in middle age I find myself reluctant often to explore
the unfamiliar, being just waht I criticized my parents for
eing in fact.

The upside of middle age is that we already know what suits us & have
the gumption to be who we are regardless of whether or not others approve. The
downside is that we can easily become set in our ways to such an extent that we
resist trying something new. As I grow older, I find myself becoming more like
my mother. But FWIW I also understand more about what made her tick... [grin].




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
* Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)