During a conversation last night I mentioned that I was taking guitar lessons, which started people talking about whether they had ever wanted to play, the usual horror stories, and two people who could still play piano (one was a semi-professional singer). This got me thinking, and I thought it might be interesting to find out what the numbers of "active" musical people would be on a nationwide basis. I start from the premise that most anyone could get involved in music, and also that music education in Canada is being eviscerated in the school system (a tragedy), unlike a country like Finland where everyone learns as much music as they can. Canada has 30 million people, so I guess Brits could double that plus a bit, and Americans double it. I define active musical people as those who do more than listen -- this could include classical musicians, garage band players, anything. I phoned a hobbyist classical musician friend of mine and he said that there were roughly 10-15 professional class orchestras in Canada, which means about 1000 professional class musicians, and 10,000 "feeder or support" musicians (his regional orchestra has trouble finding people). He thinks maybe 100,000 people in Canada can read music enough to follow a symphony score -- this of course does not affect lots of folk musicians who do just fine without reading music.

I know nothing about numbers of non-professionals. We have spots -- like Cape Breton -- where the ratio of active musicians to the general population is higher than elsewhere. But otherwise, who knows?

So, questions:

1)Anyone know, on a nationwide basis, how many people have a reasonable musical education?
2) On a nationwide basis, how many people can pick up an instrument and play a few chords or a melody?
3) How many people have a common experience of playing with others?
4) How many families play music together? 5) and so on. Any other relevant statistics or educated (or half-assed) guesses, welcome.

yours, Peter T.