At 12:02 PM 5/26/2007 -0700, Dean M. Estabrook wrote: >I would think, if anything, that their views would widen when exposed >to tonal music, IF they had the previous training you gave them.
Just to clarify, though I taught music, I didn't give them training in the traditional sense. I gave them opportunities to put hand-to-music, as it were, and to engage a wide variety of sonic experiences -- including listening into how their favorite pop songs worked. It was a process of ongoing discovery. Everyone learned to play an instrument and to read music as well as to write music; even the third-graders had to suggest and even to some degree defend their choices of notation, for example. I avoided as much as possible an implication of judgment while providing tools of discernment. (Yeah, my whole approach crazified the lesson-plan-bound administration.) Sorry for the long preface, but here's an analogy: Even with an intense early training in a language, even where it was the first language of children in a household, a language can be forgotten when overwhelmed by the dominant language of the culture. My father grew up speaking Hungarian and going to a German-speaking school (in rural New Jersey, not Europe), and only started to learn English after he was ten years old (when the family moved to New York in 1928). His German was long gone by the 1950s, and after his father died, the Hungarian started to disappear as well. It doesn't even take that long. I have some friends in the Netherlands, one of whom has been working in England for the past five years. When we were all visiting in Utrecht a few weeks ago, his brother-in-law complained that his Dutch had really gone to the dogs -- no longer properly idiomatic. One would hope early experiences provide a basis for a wider view, but I'm not optimistic about how much pressure a dominant culture can exert. Dennis Please participate in my 2007 project: http://maltedmedia.com/waam/ My "We Are All Mozart" blog: http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
