i've been on and off moving some things around in our house during my jazz listening today (so the currently upbeat good ass Patrice Rushen tracks are helpful) and my brain, when directing my body to do repetitive low attention tasks like "move stuff from a to b", wanders.
today it wandered to family music.
so, while I'm taking a break from wearing a path in some floors, I'm going to ramble, thread-style.
there's a social dynamic that's arisen over the last 20? years maybe wherein two acquaintances might find themselves at a conversation point where one asks the other "so, are there any musicians in your family?"
and then the other participant will either list off a sibling or two who played in band in school, maybe a parent who sings.
and then it's off to other topics, often, as I've seen it happen anyway.
if, by some happenstance, someone of a young-ish generation dropped into casual conversation with my grandfather and asked, he would have looked confused and then listed off what each member of his family did musically.
because when he was a kid, everybody did music. every body.
to put it in perspective a little more, my grandfather was one of thirteen siblings whose parents were German immigrant farmers to the US.
thirteen kids, all did something musically. they weren't an outlier, they were just a family of farmers.
it wasn't that they were all remarkably talented or showed early promise or anything like that.
it was the only way music happened for people. music happened by making it. at home, at school, at church, in town, to celebrate, to mourn, to advertise, all of it.
so my great aunts and uncles and grandparents played fiddles and organs and guitars and spoons and harmonicas and sang because otherwise they'd have no music at all.
recordings were new and sparse. there weren't a thousand new tracks released every Thursday.
there weren't any bands touring an arena near them. there weren't tour buses anyway.
so teaching each other music, and practicing music together, became part of social things, so that music could be shared. it's always been that way for sung music, but with the advent of the industrial revolution and some other economic changes it became easier for common folk to get inexpensive instruments. and they did - they loved it!
because it's meta - it's part of thousands of years of teaching through storytelling. sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete, but constant. we sing songs. we make music.
with the rise of consumerism and institutionalized learning and some other things, music started to become an add-on activity to life.
some people do music. other people don't, they just listen to music.
and everyone said "well, of course - some people just aren't good at music. they just aren't meant to be musicians! and that's okay!"
and it is okay. absolutely no one should feel forced into music. there is enough music in silence.
but that first bit, the assumption, is off base.
no one is good at music without doing it. lots.
like I said, not all of my greats and grands were good at making music, but they did it.
some were - my aunt Minnie played church organ for fifty-some years without missing a single solitary week.
but it didn't matter either way - they learned because they did it together, they were shown and they practiced, not formally, just together as a family.
we're at a point where we've all but eliminated public resources for sharing music education en masse with our children through the public schools. sports and STEM absorb all possible funds.
fewer and fewer kids walk around with instrument cases. more and more earbuds though.
everything leans toward consumption.
creation is something others do, for money, in industry.
and that's bad news for storytelling, folks. and when storytelling suffers, we lose knowledge.
I have no citation for that, but it's a hill I'll die on.
I don't have a fancy pat answer.
This isn't a plea to sign my petition to direct tax dollars to more free recorders for tots.
It takes more of a shift than that would accomplish anyway.
but I'd like it if folk spent a little more time thinking about how they can encourage the young folk near them to create more than they consume.
not out of some drive to produce, or be successful, but to share, both knowledge and experiences. to participate in the story and the telling.
@djsundog Creating music is probably easier on a technically level than it was ever before, but IMO this also leads to the opposite problem, where people feel uncomfortable making the first steps when they are constantly surrounded by extremely professional and technically complex music
It'd be similarly hard to motivate yourself to learn to paint when there's a Picasso on every corner
@djsundog tbf, that's basically how my brother is teaching himself :P He's a year into his apprenticeship as a motorcycle mechanic and he has probably replaced every part on his bike twice
But I get what you mean. Teaching music is hard, when we did music theory in class I was extremely bored but when I tried to do some music on the computer I would have really liked to remember some of it, and looking such things up yourself is pretty hard
@elomatreb yeah, that's the magic word - apprenticeship. apprentices are supposed to have mentors, not only answering questions or assigning tasks, but leading the apprentice through the knowledge space and making sure they learn their way around and feel at home. youtube videos and software tutorials don't do that for everyone. there needs to be more, but we regularly abandon more personal modes of knowledge transfer because it's too hard or expensive or individualized, and that's crap lol.
@elomatreb yeah, this is totally a thing too! but it's kinda like saying "cars are cool, I think I'd like to check out how to work on cars" and having someone say "okay, here's a set of professional tools and a garage. mess around a bit, watch some youtube videos if you get stuck."
our messaging, our teaching, needs fixing, badly.