| Re: Grass Roots
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."
__________________ "A tool good enough to be so used and not too good" C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength www.letsbuildhope.org |