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This One Time at Band Camp….
You know the rest of the quote. American Pie was a classic movie that piggybacked on the classic song by Don McLean. I assume he received significant royalties. The quote referred to innovative ways to play the flute.
I have said many times here and elsewhere that one of the best decisions my wife and I ever made was insisting our two sons take piano lessons before they went to middle school. We told them that after they learned to read sheet music, they could switch to the instrument of their choice as long as they played in the high school band. One became a drummer and the other played the saxophone. The reason we insisted was that when we had gone back to high school reunions, we noticed that our friends who had been in the band had much stronger ties to high school and those relationships than any other group.
Overnight band camp was not available for my sons but several weeks of daily practice in the summer and numerous hours of practice during the school year was a given. Although both of them could have excelled at high school sports, they became accomplished musicians and have maintained close friendships from those times.
There is a high school not too far away from my house and sometimes in the afternoon I hear the marching band playing the theme from the Phantom of the Opera or the Batman theme and my heart swells.
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I think we have different definitions of “classic movie.”
Good one, Drew. What’s your definition?
Part of mine is — the movie is older than my oldest child. :)
It may not be Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, but it defined its time and audience as well as any.
Unfortunately.
Both of our daughters started band in elementary school and participated all through high school. They did not regret it. My younger daughter is in her last semester of college, majoring in flute/piccolo and oboe. She realized in tenth grade that music was her thing.
Seems like these days, a lot of boys – not so much girls – can make and enjoy better “music” with computers, electronics, chemistry, etc, than with musical instruments.
In the past, such opportunities were harder to come by. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, at the time I went to High School, there was ONE computer for the whole school, and it was NOT in the office. In the office, they used typewriters.
But these days, computers and such are so ubiquitous, I certainly can’t see any reason to insist that a boy play an instrument instead – or at all – given the options now available. Especially considering the resulting employment options.
I was in school bands from 2nd or 3rd grade up to 9th. And even in elementary school I was running film projectors and such which the teachers seemed to have problems with. But the Junior High (now called Middle) school I went to starting midway through 9th grade – after we’d moved to a larger city – had electronics classes, and that was it for band.
When I restarted the violin in 1984, after not having played for 25 years, I happened to meet up with a bunch of adults on a ferry-they were returning from adult music camp. I gave my teacher the brochure, and she ordered me to go the next summer. So I did, and that turned my life in an entirely different direction. I was recruited for two community orchestras, one strings and one full orchestra, and acquired an entirely new set of friends. I played in a number of small groups, went to chamber-music camp for 8 years, and had all sorts of new experiences. Restarting the violin also caused me to change careers, since I needed my evenings free to play in groups. Covid has wrought havoc on my music, since the orchestra I was playing in stopped meeting, and the church that had the sing- and play-along Messiah has not done it for three years.
Musicians have used chemistry for centuries now. In a way computers are a good thing because they make recording much easier but they’re also destroying music. Too much music today lacks the human element that makes music so enjoyable to me. Tempo variences and instruments and vocals not being 100% in tune are a good thing. I’d rather listen to a drummer with innovation and feel than drum machine. Instruments not being 100% in tune leads to more overtones which give it a fuller sound. It’s the reason why I can listen to an old analog recording multiple times and not get bored by it. Music played by real musicians have so much varience. They didn’t play the same repetitive stuff throughout the whole song. The human analog sound is where the joy is at.
I agree with all of that, and I wasn’t referring to people actually using computers to make music. That’s why I put “music” in quotes. I meant that many people can be more expressive and creative with computers, even if it’s something like 3D games, or electronics in general, or chemistry, or physics, or what-have-you, than they could be with a musical instrument. But in the past, computers weren’t available to most people. So they might have done school bands etc because that’s all there was.
Since there are so many options now, I don’t think it makes sense to force children into music, just because somehow they “should” or ‘it’s good for them” or whatever, if that’s not where their interests and talents and creativity really are.
I did a lot more good, for a lot more people, with the business computer programming I did, than I ever would have playing baritone even if I’d stayed with it forever.
Ah, but you did study music, and many of the documented benefits of studying music remain, in the most unexpected places. Except, really, they aren’t unexpected at all. Music is logical. It has elements of order, and one learns quickly the differences between order and chaos. ( a few days ago Mrs. QuietPI happened across notes from a college conducting class. “Q: What is the role of the conductor?” A: “To prevent chaos.” But I digress.)
Music and musical instruments are a virtual laboratory of physics, especially, of course, acoustics. And the laws of acoustics remain, whether ocean waves or light: Why does a violin have a brighter sound as you move the bow toward the bridge? Why do ocean waves pass harmlessly underneath piers, but beat unmercifully the shore? Long ago I heard someone say that music was actually the artistic expression of mathematics.
Musicians live longer, have lower – than – average rates of dementia.
Computers certainly have their place. Remember the Moog synthesizer? The album, “Switched On Bach?” It revealed in a whole new way the transcendent genius of ol’ Johann. It was Bach, by the way, who came up with even tempering, that raised keyboard instruments to a whole new level.
But I heard an interview of one of the world’s greatest living musicians a year or so ago. It may have been Yo Yo Ma, but I won’t bet a cup of coffee on it. He was asked what it was like playing the same pieces over and over and over. He answered, but it is never the same. Every time I play it, it’s new. It’s different.
“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.” Shakespeare
Band was definitely my “escape” in high school. Spent many lunch hours in the band room hanging out with a few others, too.
Making sure our kids got some kind of music lessons was important to me. Both took piano for a few years.
Youngest decided she preferred no formal lessons at all, which she declared were too stressful for her. She insisted she would teach herself guitar instead. (Although she’s kind of back to semi-formal lessons with our worship director at church, because he’s trying to prep the next generation of musicians to lead worship.)
The Oldest really took to piano and has been continuing lessons even now into college.
Band was great, but being in the Jazz band meant unlimited freedom of the hallways.
You don’t see how you argued for my point, do you?
Oh, I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I was just pointing out how music enhances whatever you do.
Okay. Well I still think that some people with talents for other “arts” would benefit most by concentrating on those arts they enjoy most/are best at, and skip music – at least PLAYING music themselves – entirely. They can get all those things that also exist in music, and enjoy them more, in their chosen areas that were often not open to most people – especially young people – in the past.
Music has aspects beyond math, and math has aspects that cannot be expressed musically.
Those other fields also don’t rely on hearing ability the way that music does (yes I know, Beethoven was deaf, etc.) and which many people seem to lack to varying degrees. (Among other things, I’ve told the story of my first college roommate before.) But they can express the “music” in their other thoughts, and/or written words, etc.
Bottom line, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to insist that children take piano lessons, etc. ESPECIALLY not PIANO lessons.
Well, you’re wrong.
Nothing would have put me off music more than having to take piano lessons.
Fortunately my parents were smarter than that.
And I might not have avoided injuries in school the way I did, if getting a broken arm etc like many kids I went to school with got – from skiing or running-backwards races etc – meant getting out of piano lessons. Maybe that’s why THEY did such dumb stuff!
Too much randomness etc regarding piano especially, versus the relative straightforwardness of computer code, or chemistry…
You might want to do some research beyond your own children, to discover how many kids wound up hating music – and maybe their parents too – over piano lessons.
I suspect that happens more with boys than girls, but still.
My daughter will tell you that music and math are very much related.
But not equivalent. Someone who’s a prodigy at music may hate serious math, and someone who’s a prodigy at math may hate piano lessons. It makes no sense to force a math prodigy to take piano lessons which they hate, just because they’re “related.” They could end up avoiding math too.
The point is your argument about music, “especially” piano, being “random” and unlike the straightforwardness of computer code or chemistry is just bananas. Music is straightforward. It’s mathematical. It is not random. It has very specific rules and formulas, just like computer code or chemistry.
One could say that writing music is very much like writing computer code.
There’s nothing random about music, especially piano, where the pitch is set by the piano tuner – and hopefully, prayerfully, the piano is in tune. It may be worth noting that the elements of what we know as the scale, and how the different pitches (notes) relate to each other, was discovered by a mathematician we know as Pythagoras.
The problem with kids not liking music arises from the culture, and especially the parents. Kids imitate their parents. They also learn from what they hear, even before they’re born. True, boys are by nature more active than girls, and for that reason, the most popular “starter” instrument now is the violin. There’s more opportunity for kinetic activity. But still, if there’s a piano in the house – or any other instrument, actually, and the child sees a parent playing it, or singing, and enjoying it, then s/he is much more likely to follow in the parents’ footsteps. If the parents watch football, then in the same way, the kid will grow up watching football.
I recently saw a video that illustrates this perfectly. Our nine – month old granddaughter, standing, supporting herself on her sister’s harp, “singing” while big sister played.
Pythagoras found that the tone produced by a string was in inverse proportion to the string’s length. Set the intervals to the ratio 3:2, and you get a perfect fifth.
I was referring more to PLAYING piano. Chords, key changes, black keys vs white keys… Nothing like that even when I was playing baritone in school, for that matter. And certainly not with computers, which I’ve been doing for over 50 years now.
When I was in public school in Seattle in the 1950s, music was a requirement starting in fourth grade. Everyone picked an instrument, and I chose violin. I played in the school orchestra, trading off concertmaster with another girl. I was selected for the all-city elementary orchestra. I quit after sixth grade, because I hated my private teacher. If I’d told my parents that, they might have found me a new teacher, but I didn’t.
Ah hah! You just hit on why the piano is so valuable a tool for learning music. It demonstrates visually exactly what is happening with the pitches, and their relationships to each other. But I have to go to a meeting. Maybe more later. For now, remember that the first valve lowers the pitch of the instrument one step. The second key lowers the pitch 1/2 step, and the third key lowers the pitch 1 1/2 steps.
Granted, any keyboard instrument will do.
That’s my point too. Many creative people are creative in ways that don’t relate to or benefit from a link to music. Insisting that they take piano lessons anyway, is not helpful to either themselves, or to society at large, especially if it sours them on following their ACTUAL creativity.
Jumping back into the conversation I started, when my wife and I insisted our sons take piano lessons it was an opening gambit. We knew that piano lessons were often tedious, but we also knew that if they developed a minimal proficiency they could join a social organization (the high school band) that was very likely to be a positive influence on the rest of their lives. If you raise children wisely, you give them somewhat limited choices that encourage them to grow.
It was one of the best decisions we ever made and I think my sons both agree.
Actually we knew piano lessons were tedious and our kids would rebel. We did it hoping that if we let them pick another instrument in order to be in the band, they would choose something they really enjoyed. We hoped they would become good musicians (which they did) but we were fairly confident that if they went through high school with a large group of friends, both male and female, they would come out with a sense of accomplishment and fellowship.
But how does that really work, considering that MOST kids in any school AREN’T in the band?
Well, it made since to me at the time and it still does. I felt like the kids in the marching band were a better group of kids to make long term relationships with. It seems simple to me but maybe I am a simpleton.