derekkress

You're making a lot of sense. More and more students are left alone in the classroom to do modules. The teacher just hangs around to help out if the student doesn't understand something. I'm doing everything to prevent my children from attending those types of classrooms. Probably will have to send them to private school. As I said earlier in this post we need to entertain sometimes. We cannot forget who our listeners really are. If music is fun people will follow. Even tonight despite a star studded cast (including Ingrid, Kevin Turcotte, Jocelyn Couture, Lina Allamano and the rest of the jazz ensemble)I'm reluctant to attend the concert since it is very avant garde music. Not because I don't appreciate this type of music but because I know that these players and the rest of the members in the band can really swing and improvise but won't be able to since they will be stuck in the form that was chosen for them by the composer(Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North). I hope I'm wrong, if so at least I'll be able to have a beer with the gang!

derekkress

I started playing trumpet just after the Commodore 64 came on the market.At that time kids were still making their own costumes for Halloween, we were playing street hockey all the time beating up our father's garage doors, we would walk long distances or bike to get to where we wanted to, musically Drum and Bugle corps were in almost every Canadian city and I'm sure we can all think of many other activities which encouraged participation and community that seem lost forever now! Yes my kids have an Xbox but believe me they get a good kick in the behind to do other things, however friends influence friends so guess what they still end up playing Xbox and the likes at another friend's place who may or may not get a kick in the behind also.Grassroots to me is community. But in the day of not thinking and one week at mom's and one week at dad's (not my case still married)it's more and more difficult to create stimulating environments. I will always support the cause and live music, as I'm sure we are all trying to do. Spread our music and our love of it since it can be contagious!

Vulgano Brother

Thanks trumpetdad (and welcome to TM, by the way!) and derekkress, for addressing an important issue--we humans like to hear what we like to hear, and can be either turned off by sounds we don't like or music we can't understand, much like small children and food. We all have at our disposal (I chose that word carefully) a vast archive of musical events from the past. As a society we have lost that sense of ritual and pilgrimage that used to attend musical excursions of the past. I'm talking about packing a picnic lunch and the kids in the buggy (horseless or otherwise) for the Saturday band concert in the park, or sitting in a candlelit space to hear the first music outside of church for a week; the smell of hay in the barn for the dance. We have everything at our fingertips now (heck, we've even got buttons on our trumpet's spit valves!) and channel surfing is the norm.

As musicians, we've messed our own brains up (literally--our left side lights up with music, for a non-musican listener the right side glows), and we (the collective we, including musicians, non-musicians and even violists) have forgotten that music is a whole body experience, content to have compressed music flowing through ear-buds.

At the Women and Children's Shelter, where I'm currently working, we have what is called "Mandatory Fun." Events that take them out of themselves to experience Sound, Touch, Taste, Smell and the wonder of it all once again. Maybe we all need a little "Mandatory Fun."

tromj

I think some interesting points are being made here. I teach a British Brass Band at a private school in Manhattan, a program founded by Doug Hedwig. Now Khora and I teach there. Doug's kid was going to that school, and he wanted the kids to have an instrumental option. what started as a small program now has about 75 kids lugging their instruments from Zabar's to Fairway (NYC reference) who otherwise would not have had the benefits of a band program. You make your own scene indeed, and dont assume that because you are in a big urban setting that those musical needs can't be created and fed by us.
Now I have initiated a similar program in my own kid's school. Our first group has 11 kids. I know that when the other kids hear their classmates play, we will double our enrollment. It does not require us being negative about modern life, just be positive about the music we love.
It's up to us, folks.
BTW, Ed, the clip I was hoping to hear was that fabulous solo at the beginning of the Jetsons. Who was that?

Jordan

Khora

Amen Jordan. Thanks for saying exactly what I was thinking, but haven't had time to put in writing.

Smithi20

Thanks Chris, you have expanded on my most important points!

Diplomacy hasn´t ever been one of my strong points! and here I am being sore... (another type of love maybe)

It would just be interesting to see if there was more money for new commissions becauase Wynton would have raised the profile so everyone could benefit, or not. Methinks yes.... it would be far cooler to invest money in new pieces if he had done so and was still touring the concert halls doing so...

and ROW, for short, I cannot assume anything...... given that Lennie passed away in 1990, (and sorry Ed, you can slap me about this if you want) he was not only the safest and most high profile choice to commission, but there have been no more for the last 18 years!

OK, Wynton has the complete choice, as we all do, to do whatever he wants. He must have refused numerous compositional dedications over the last years, or are you kidding me? Let´s get real here.

But I think that this should belong to another thread..... so sorry for being a diva, and anyone who want´s to follow a thread simply called Wynton can do so.... I adore lively discussion!

TrentAustin

Bud Brisbois recorded the Jetsons I do believe. What a FANTASTIC player he was.

derekkress

Mandatory fun! A great idea! By the way the great players based in New York, Toronto and Montreal pulled off a great show playing very difficult contemporary jazz tonight here in Montreal in Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North. For those in Toronto this weekend attending IAJE conference the band will be there along with many other great artists. Tonight I had my mandatory fun!Pass it on!

Sterling

This is a great thread. Upon first reading, I was with the crowd,"What's wrong with these kids, teachers, connunities, etc." Then I started to list all of the community bands, orchestras, brass ensembles, youth wind ensembles and orchestras outside of their schools and I was heartened. Within a 30 minute drive from my house I could be playing in as many as 6 community bands, one brass insemble, or one community orchestra. High school students can play in two youth symphonies and two wind ensembles outside of their schools. Don't get me started on choral ensembles around here! I guess my point is to get mad, then look around where you live. You might be pleasantly suprised!

ckallmyer

I don't have a problem with fun music. But I seriously doubt that is the fun-factor that is missing from what we do. R Murray Schafer has this to say in his writing "Music and the Soundscape"

In the Western tradition music is an abstract entertainment for the pleasure of the ears alone. The word abstract is empathic. Listeners are not encouraged to associate music with functions or purposes beyond the aesthetic enjoyment it provides. Functional music is relegated to a lower order and music that is made to serve political, mercantile or even religious purposes is always under critical suspicion. Religious music sometimes escapes censure because so many Western composers wrote so much of it; but the conservatories and concert halls where it is taught and performed have been careful to minimize whatever religious messages it may sustain, concentrating on its aesthetic merits. . . .

Definitely the concert promises psychic rather than somatic satisfaction, and the composer uses the concentration of the audience to arrange his materials in a vast architecture . . .

For the history of western classical I generally agree with his analysis, but I am not happy with what this means. This analysis for instance doesn't cover jazz or popular music--but I think is about "western academic musics." HERE IS THE DIVIDE I PROPOSE THROUGH SCHAFER'S WRITINGS AND FROM MY TWISTED HEAD.

I think that our kids arn't interested because what I call "The Bruce Factor"--of course referring to the great rocker, Bruce Springsteen. When I think of Bruce, I think of the smells of dank rock clubs (sweat, beer, irrepressible dankness). I also think about a mass of sweaty people dancing, jumping and singing (in total freedom caught in the SOMATIC experience). Additionally I think of Bruce and Clarence Clemmons (his sax player) speaking rock tongues, wearing their hearts on their sleeves and lastly playing music. THIS IS A MULTI-SENSORY experience, that puts the audience beyond an aesthetic experience to a cathartic encounter with something greater. I think (from my experience playing punk music in dank basements) that music like this not only lifts your spirit, but your person---at times I felt transformed.

I believe that this is the basis on which most popular music operates (maybe without the dankocity). With this in mind, most classical or band music can't counter this high standard of sensory involvement? What happens when you resign kids to rows of chairs in a quiet room and expect them to be physically sedate, but aurally active? You get bored kids, because the music doesn't come to them---its takes a lot of energy to listen intently. This is an even more difficult task after a day of work.

Vulgano-I think that a picnic and brass music is a musical experience not just a concert. (the buggy ride and fried chicken is part of the music)

I don't agree with a lack of fun being the problem. I think it is the context in which our music(traditional to avant-garde) is presented to young people. R Murray Schafer goes onto say "The great revolutions in art history are changes of context rather than style. The first big contextual change in Western music occurred when music left the outdoors and entered the cathedral; the second occurred with the appearance of the concert hall and opera house; the broadcasting and recording studio is responsible for the third." What is the next change of context that draws our future generations into music? I think music needs to go outside again, but that is my own feeling (not to disparage indoor concert music).

-chris

PS--great post Trumpetdad---kids are WAY overworked.