Dear Anthony,
Thank you for making that clear. BTW, I would be very interested to hear more about life up country among the hill tribes. I hope they treated you with appropriate respect - perhaps as the people of Vanuatu do with Prince Philip? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_Movement). Of course Philip did descend from the heavens in a helicopter, and I see you more as a 2CV kind of chap. (I suppose I'd better put in a smiley here.) :-) Cheers, Paul Gretton ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- From: Anthony Robb [mailto:anth...@robbpipes.com] Sent: 02 November 2009 09:32 To: nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu; Paul Gretton Subject: Re: [NSP] Re: [BULK] Re: [nsp] file Dear Paul As Philip G. points out, some good points but hardly germane. I think I made it clear that I was speaking very particularly, in fact here is the quote from my original email refering to the region I was focussing on, "the outlying districts of north Northumberland". I was talking about the people I lived amongst and were the traditional players of north Northumberland, i.e. the people at the heart of the discussion. None of the 20th century "musical heavyweights" from that region were dots readers and had all learnt by ear as had their predecessors. It was not a general statement; it was a particular one of importance to those discussing the music of Northumberland in terms of notated music and drawing conclusions from it. Cheers Anthony --- On Sun, 1/11/09, Paul Gretton <i...@gretton-willems.com> wrote: From: Paul Gretton <i...@gretton-willems.com> Subject: [NSP] Re: [BULK] Re: [nsp] file To: nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu Date: Sunday, 1 November, 2009, 6:20 PM Anthony Robb wrote: >>>dot reading was an extremely rare skill at the time If you mean specifically among players of the NSP (or the fiddle, then perhaps - I wouldn't know. But if you mean in general, then that is a far too sweeping statement. Musical literacy was my no means uncommon, even among the working class. You are ignoring the influence of the Sunday school system, particularly among Nonconformists, and the self-improvement movement among the so-called "better" working class, with the miners being among the leaders. Large numbers of "ordinary" people could read music - witness the great Handel festivals and organisations like the Huddersfield Choral Society. Cheers, Paul Gretton To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html