Subj : Musical Miscellany... 1. To : Richard Webb From : Ardith Hinton Date : Fri Mar 02 2018 02:36:56 Hi, Richard! Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton: AH> The war pipes... i.e. the kind others think of when they AH> think of bagpipes... were *supposed* to scare the heck AH> out of the enemy. They sound nice from a few miles away, AH> though, if one is not in any danger.... :-) RW> RIght, but when they're oming close they make quite a RW> noise . 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.... :-))) AH> So as a band teacher I estimated the average age of the AH> parents in the audience & did a number at every concert AH> which was popular when they were teenagers. ;-) RW> GOod plan. Makes the parents feel better too when they RW> hear something they recognize . 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.... :-) RW> ONe thing that helped me was the older kids at the RW> school for the blind, where ad hoc combos of musicians RW> were as ubiquitous as sandlot baseball among RW> neighborhood sighted kids. AH> Meanwhile Dallas & I... being, as it were, neither fish AH> nor fowl... spent much of our time soaking up anything AH> we could find which had printing on it. Yet IMHO we were AH> all honing the skills we'd need in our adult lives. :-) RW> YEp, hopefully will never quit "honing my skills." Glad to hear it.... :-) AH> In retrospect I'd say the music which grabbed my AH> attention at the same age differed a bit... but not too AH> much... from what I was used to. RW> rIght, but there again my cultural frames of reference RW> were all over the map, thanks to residential school with RW> 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. :-/ RW> now in middle age I find myself reluctant often to explore RW> the unfamiliar, being just waht I criticized my parents for RW> 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) .