Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Mudlark
Date: 05 Nov 02 - 02:56 AM

Good for yodelayteeeyou, RangerSteve...I would love to pull up next to a cop car and hear yodelng coming from it. In fact, just thinking about that has made my day.

I have to say, though, I find singing "Kokomo, me baby" in the car , along with Bonnie Raitt, is good practice too.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Little Hawk
Date: 05 Nov 02 - 01:13 AM

Very cool. We have got the makings of a great cop show here..."Ranger Steve" (the singing patrolman). You are right, one of the best places to sing is in a car while driving...I do that too, quite a bit, and it is good practice for the voice.

- LH

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Peter T.
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 06:52 PM

"Donuts, Do-oh-oh-nuts,

Donuts gone, and me wanna go home...."


(The Cop Diet Song). Thanks McGrath. Your ticket is on its way. You have maligned policemen all over the world.

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 05:59 PM

Singing duets that was supposed to be!

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 05:58 PM

I love the idea of RangerSteve in his cop car driving down the highway yodelling away and singing diets with himself. "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean..." Move over Dirty Harry and all that lot of hyped up psychopaths, this is the kind of screen hero I want to see.

I tend to think the best thing schools could do for us would be to ban folk music and so forth and threaten dire punishments against anyone who tried to play it. And just to make sure, they could encourage the kids to go in for gangsta-rap instead, and give them homework based on it.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: RangerSteve
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 05:47 PM

This isn't a new argument. John Philip Sousa said phonographs would do the same thing. For that reason, he allowed his band to record, but he wouldn't conduct them (some recordings identify Sousa as the conductor, but that's a lie). I think he was right. My first car didn't have a radio, and I taught myself to yodel while driving to work. My second car had a radio, and I stopped singing and yodeling in my car. For that last fifteen years, I've been a cop, and I can't have the AM/FM radio on in the car, because it tends to drown out the police radio, so I've gotten back to singing to entertain myself. My voice has improved quite a bit, and I figured out how to do that throat singing (producing two notes at once, there's a previous thread on Mudcat about it). I don't advocate ditching music appliances, but there's nothing wrong with turning them off once in a while.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: KateG
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 02:53 PM

It might help, too, if schools encouraged children to learn and play instruments other than band/orchestra ones. After all, the sousaphone (to pick a random example, with no offense intended to those who love the instrument) is hardly a good jamming instrument, or one that is endearing to neighbors late at night. Encouraging kids to explore folk music, bluegrass, old-time, jazz, etc. -- even rennaisance and early baroque -- genres that were developed and supported by and for players who played in their own homes for their own enjoyment and that of their close friends, rather than the concert/marching band stuff that was commissioned for paid professionals to play for passive listeners.

KateG

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Little Hawk
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 02:38 PM

The best thing I can add to this is that in Cuba, where there are far fewer TV's, computers, etc, a really large number of people seem to enjoy singing, dancing, playing instruments, playing sports, having parties in the courtyard, on the beach....in other words doing it themselves rather than watching a film of someone else doing it.

I think you would find this is generally true of people with a simpler material lifestyle. They are more personally empowered and more directly involved in life.

- LH

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 02:29 PM

Fewer opianos, but probably a lot more guitars around these days than there were 50 years ago.

I think we're just moving into the post-TV era (as opposed to the TV era which came after the pre-TV era).

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Marion
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 02:20 PM

Wilco, you've missed a show called The Simpsons which is western society's greatest achievement.

Marion

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Wesley S
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 01:32 PM

The front porch also disappeared about the same time as the TV was invented.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Mudlark
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 01:14 PM

The advent of radio, and then worse yet, TV not only supplanted homemade music as a passtime, it has distanced amateurs from the idea that their music is valid, to themselves and to others. Like that line in Playing Real Good for Free says: "Nobody seemed to hear him, tho he played so sweet and high, They'd never seen him on their TV, so they just passed his music on by."

On the other hand, TV's don't kill music, people kill music. There is nothing but mental laziness to keep one from enjoying a movie, or documentary, and THEN making music, nothing to stop people from abandoning the hum of their air conditioner and sitting on the front porch in the evening and strumming on the old banjo...except maybe for the sound of a leaf blower being used next door.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Socorro
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 01:00 PM

Whether it's made-up or not, the point is well-taken. Now that i have come, rather late, to the joys of making music with friends, I know what a loss it is that everyone doesn't try their hand at it.
I just can't believe that a lot of people don't even have a piano in the house.
Of course, if you sing a capella, you don't even need that. It takes a while to learn to harmonize, so i say, "get started"!!
I always did see the TV (that is, post-"Mickey Mouse Club") as a tool of damnation (just joking, but the resulting alienation, ability to be highly entertained while all alone & completely passive, etc.) is obviously unhealthy.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Peter T.
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 12:30 PM

I imagine that the statistics about pianos in middle class houses would probably be fairly high in the early 20th century. Air conditioning didn't help the porchtime concerts any either. However, your friend's statistic sounds made up.

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Ebbie
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 11:49 AM

I suspect that part of the decline of playing 'live' is due to the pervasiveness of 'canned' music, that people, young people specifically, feel that studio music is music, period. In other words, that it has to be professionally done.

Growing up listening to the radio may lead to inspiration; watching TV performances may lead one to deduce that music is a package complete with choreography and flowing background.

Subject: RE: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: Mooh
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 11:23 AM

5% sounds low to me but I still wouldn't be surprised. TV has rotted alot of minds and wasted alot of time. I watch TV, always with an instrument if I'm alone, but there's live music in my house every day.

There are families trying to break the trend though. I always ask my students what sort of music they have at home and a few of them are the first ones in their immediate family to play anything. Most however have a rich family interest in music. All those other families I wish I could influence...

I can't imagine what my life would have been like without live music.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: Pre-TV: 70% played music. Post-TV ,5%
From: wilco
Date: 04 Nov 02 - 10:43 AM

The "TV thread" reminded me of a recent conversation with a musician friend. He is a historian, who claims that, prior to commercial radio and TV, 90% of homes in the US had musicians and musical insturments. Nowadays, it's around 5%. Is there some definitive, scientific study of thsi somewhere.
    My deceased dad told me that, back in the 1920's and 1930's, you could ride the street-cars or walk through neighborhoods, and you would ALWAYS hear live music from the porches, yards, and houses.
    I quit watching TV in 1963. Have I missed anything?