{"id":3783,"date":"2009-06-19T11:26:58","date_gmt":"2009-06-19T11:26:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/19\/what-is-your-musical-backgroun\/"},"modified":"2009-06-19T11:26:58","modified_gmt":"2009-06-19T11:26:58","slug":"what-is-your-musical-backgroun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/19\/what-is-your-musical-backgroun\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Your Musical Background?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an interesting discussion going on in a place I can&#8217;t link to, spinning off a <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/if_its_not_boring_its_not_art.php#comment-1714716\">comment to the NEA post from the other day<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The point is that the amount of people who see value in or are trained to appreciate more esoteric, more difficult, less accessible music **may** have dropped.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The basic idea is that the decline in the audience for &#8220;high art&#8221; forms of music may be attributed to cutbacks in musical education in schools. People just aren&#8217;t educated enough to know that they ought to like classical music, or some such.<\/p>\n<p>This led to a discussion of people&#8217;s experience with music education in school, which has produced plural anecdotes over there. I thought it would be interesting to repeat the experiment here, so there&#8217;s a quick poll behind the cut:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\" language=\"javascript\" charset=\"utf-8\" src=\"http:\/\/static.polldaddy.com\/p\/1719472.js\"><\/script><noscript><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/answers.polldaddy.com\/poll\/1719472\/\">What sort of musical education did you get in school?<\/a><span style=\"font-size:9px;\">(<a href=\"http:\/\/www.polldaddy.com\">survey<\/a>)<\/span><br \/>\n<\/noscript><\/p>\n<p>(It&#8217;s inelegant, but with all the recent server issues, I don&#8217;t want to rely on people being able to leave comments.)<\/p>\n<p>My own musical education was not much more than the standard for my school in the 80&#8217;s: we had music class something like three days a week up through seventh or eight grade, which mostly consisted of singing songs, learning the basics of reading music, and occasionally playing simple instruments. The junior-high level class included a bit of music history&#8211; we did units on a couple of classical composers, and three pop-music units, one on the Beatles, one on Billy Joel, and one about Rush (go figure). I remember writing a term paper about Tchiakovsky, though all I really remember of it is some of the lurid details (he had a giant crush on his nephew, which led to all sorts of problems).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m pretty sure we talked about the different eras of classical music, but I don&#8217;t remember them. I&#8217;m terrible with era names that way&#8211; we spent a good deal of time on English history in high school, but I have only a hazy idea of the War of the Roses, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the relationship between them.  I could probably put them in order, but I wouldn&#8217;t want to stake anything important on it.<\/p>\n<p>I was also in the band from about fifth grade all the way through high school (I played trumpet), which means I know how to read music, and have a vague idea about keys and the like, but that&#8217;s about it. I never took music theory (though it was offered), so I don&#8217;t know the formal difference between major and minor chords, or any of that.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m highly skeptical of the notion that lack of formal education is the reason for the decline in the audience for classical music. Instead, I think it&#8217;s related to the fact that music of that style hasn&#8217;t really been popular in thirty to forty years. Even movie soundtracks these days are less about orchestral arrangements (the occasional John Williams score or <cite>The Lord of the Rings<\/cite> aside), and more about selections of vaguely relevant pop songs. It&#8217;s a niche musical form these days, and we&#8217;re a whole generation away from the time when knowledge of classical music mattered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an interesting discussion going on in a place I can&#8217;t link to, spinning off a comment to the NEA post from the other day: The point is that the amount of people who see value in or are trained to appreciate more esoteric, more difficult, less accessible music **may** have dropped. The basic idea&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/06\/19\/what-is-your-musical-backgroun\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What Is Your Musical Background?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-music","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}