Hi again, James! This is a continuation of my previous message to you:

[re chords]

L!!! Bagpipers do it by just blowing hard.

Well... I suppose they might have to blow hard initially to fill the bladder with air, but AFAIK it's the drones which supply the "harmony". From the standpoint of a clarinet player one of the scary things about bagpipes is that the drones & the reed seem to do their own thing (almost) independently. Another is that while I would put more air into my instrument to produce more volume, bagpipe players seem to do it when the bladder is about to run out of air. I inhale when my lungs are about to run out of air. As a member of the audience you'd realize that I do it at the end of a phrase or whatever... but for me watching a piper is like watching a person speaking a foreign language with dubbing in English. I can't reconcile what I see with what I hear. :-)

"That drummer can't keep time." even if it *was* the
keyboardist that initiated the tempo shift. <G>

In our community band it's usually the trumpets or the flutes or the saxes... never the clarinets! But as John Bradshaw has pointed out, blame is like a hot potato which everybody is trying to pass on to somebody else. ;-)

George Clinton said it best. In a mumble, "Whatever
you say - and we tried - Rap music brought blacks and
whites together for better or worse."

So did jazz. When I was learning to play the clarinet, people often asked "Why do you want to play the clarinet? That's a boy's instrument!" By the time I'd graduated from university it was a girl's instrument. To me the whims of fashion are of no great concern... but the behaviour of human beings in groups is very intriguing. Among professional musicians & their fans such trivia as gender & skin colour are irrelevant from where I sit. Dallas often played in mostly black groups to mostly white *adult* audiences. I wonder if these suburban kids relate to rap music because their parents don't... [BEG].

A few Holloweens ago,

|I have heard many people pronounce it that way
recently, but where I come from it's AKA All
Hallows' Eve... the day before All Saints' Day.
For those of us whose grandparents were farmers
"hallow" rhymes with "fallow" & "tallow". :-))

I was doling out the treats to a few late stragglers
when a car drove by thumpin' and bumpin' so loud I
could hear something in the trunk rattling. I asked the
girls what it must sound like *inside* that vehicle if
it sounds so bad from here.

Well done! Now I'm curious as to the response. When I had students in grade eight who informed me they didn't like anything except rock music, I figured that was all they knew. After being exposed to a variety of stuff in my class a few of them admitted they also enjoyed other genres at times. :-)




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

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

[re bagpipes]

[...] not reconciling what you see with what's
happening is another part of what those things
do, always remember they were created as munitions.

Could be. 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.... :-)

Entertainment wasn't their thing.

Yes. I'm more likely to hear them at the local pub on Robbie Burns Day... that's entertainment AFAIC, considering I won't be required to read ODE TO A HAGGIS or something of the sort aloud (I taught English too). I can just relax & marvel at how well I understand strange accents these days, and wonder why the piper decided to fill the bladder when s/he got to wherever I am. :-)

I wonder if these suburban kids relate to rap music
because their parents don't... [BEG].

I think that's a big part of it with the young folks,
as it was with young folks of our generations too.

Things I've learned from hanging out with the neighbours... after I had been listening to 1960's folk rock in a teenage girl's bedroom, her father said to her "Why don't you listen to good music like [what I'm listening to at the moment]?" I realized immediately that for him good music = what he liked, and I recognized the station as one which played a lot of "golden oldies". 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. ;-)

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. :-)

Also, I had an uncle who was heavily into older forms
of jazz. HE could sit down with me as I was listening
to rock 'n roll, then put something else on the stereo
and show me how one lead to the other.

Good pedagogical technique! I did much the same with my father one day when I was alone at home with him. By then I was in university, and I had a recording of Wanda Landowska playing harpsichord with a bunch of stops which I've never heard used anywhere else. As usual my father was listening to hard rock on the radio because he was accustomed to a noisy work environment & felt uncomfortable without background noise... i.e. his preferred variety of noise. He also liked honky-tonk piano, however. I explained to him that the sound of the harpsichord was similar & persuaded him to listen for a few moments. When the music ended I could have put on anything with a harpsichord in it. And as a band teacher I often demonstrated how something which was on the current hit parade was an updated version of the music teens say they don't like.... :-))

[...] this was late '60's early '70's, and exploration
was the driving force, at least in my world.

Uh-huh. 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.

Exploration is a driving force with teens & young adults. They are learning by trial & error what works for them, and stimulating the development of the appropriate brain cells. If their parents weren't so incredibly boring they probably wouldn't have the courage to leave home & take on that big scary world outside. Seems to me both of us were more or less on target there. :-)




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