Hi, Richard!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

AH>  The war pipes... i.e. the kind others think of when they
AH>  think of bagpipes... were *supposed* to scare the heck
AH>  out of the enemy.  They sound nice from a few miles away,
AH>  though, if one is not in any danger....  :-)

RW>  RIght, but when they're oming close they make quite a
RW>  noise .


          Uh-huh.  And if a student asks you to help him tune his drones you do
*not* want to do it in a small practice room.  I made that mistake once, when
I was young & foolish.  I won't do it again....  :-)))



AH>  So as a band teacher I estimated the average age of the
AH>  parents in the audience & did a number at every concert
AH>  which was popular when they were teenagers.  ;-)

RW>  GOod plan.  Makes the parents feel better too when they
RW>  hear something they recognize .


          Agreed.  I imagine you've used the same principle in your own
work... and I've noticed the conductor of our community band doing it as
well.  We play at a lot of nursing homes where the age of the audience is
fairly predictable & we use a book of folk songs, hymns, light classics etc.
in our warmup.  Chances are the "older" crowd will recognize at least one of
any three numbers....  :-)



RW>  ONe thing that helped me was the older kids at the
RW>  school for the blind, where ad hoc combos of musicians
RW>  were as ubiquitous as sandlot baseball among
RW>  neighborhood sighted kids.

AH>  Meanwhile Dallas & I... being, as it were, neither fish
AH>  nor fowl... spent much of our time soaking up anything
AH>  we could find which had printing on it.  Yet IMHO we were
AH>  all honing the skills we'd need in our adult lives.  :-)

RW>  YEp, hopefully will never quit "honing my skills."


          Glad to hear it....  :-)



AH>  In retrospect I'd say the music which grabbed my
AH>  attention at the same age differed a bit... but not too
AH>  much... from what I was used to.

RW>  rIght, but there again my cultural frames of reference
RW>  were all over the map, thanks to residential school with
RW>  kids from all sorts of backgrounds.


          Ah... thanks for the clarification!  I wasn't sure in which order
you attended which school because I've known various people who for various
reasons transferred to a more specialized environment later.  At residential
school you would indeed encounter a variety of kids, and you'd also have an
opportunity to get to know them in a way you wouldn't if everyone was
returning home at night. One of the things I appreciate about the schools I
went to is the socioeconomic mix I found there.  Although I didn't have the
same opportunity you did to join ad hoc combos, I learned to get along with
people from various walks of life... and I learned that they tend to have
different tastes in music.  My only regret is that figuring out what works for
me took so many years because the classical snobs & those of decidedly more
plebian tastes occupied so much bandwidth.  :-/



RW>  now in middle age I find myself reluctant often to explore
RW>  the unfamiliar, being just waht I criticized my parents for
RW>  eing in fact.


          The upside of middle age is that we already know what suits us &
have the gumption to be who we are regardless of whether or not others
approve.  The downside is that we can easily become set in our ways to such an
extent that we resist trying something new.  As I grow older, I find myself
becoming more like my mother.  But FWIW I also understand more about what made
her tick... [grin].




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)