A short word in praise of this mail header.
Francis
On 2 Nov 2009, at 14:45, Paul Gretton wrote:
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
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