Hi Keith,
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 2:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Primitive
Art
> At 12:20 25/03/03 -0500, you wrote:
> <<<<
> . . . . The rule of the marketplace is that people choose what they "want"
> but only the most unsophisticated would claim that the environment doesn't
> shape that "want." A depraved environment creates a depraved desire. . . .
> >>>>
>
> Very true, Ray. And a deprived environment creates a deprived desire.
> <<<<
> . . . . The rule of the marketplace is that people choose what they "want"
> but only the most unsophisticated would claim that the environment doesn't
> shape that "want." A depraved environment creates a depraved desire. . . .
> >>>>
>
> Very true, Ray. And a deprived environment creates a deprived desire.
Yep!
>
> Hardly any secondary state school in England teaches singing or music now.
>
> Hardly any secondary state school in England teaches singing or music now.
Why? What
government official decreed that the language of Art would
ignored? A people who have had their song stolen are a people
without an identity. Or is it because of the Beatles and Lord
Webber?
> Pretty well the only source of singers for choirs and players of
> instruments for orchestras comes from those who've been taught at private
> schools in the country (7% of the whole). So the free market place is
> doing its best.
You must remember that over here the school
that I grew up in was in one of the most deprived and polluted areas in the
nation. My father made $3,500 and he was the Superintendent of
Schools. He built the Arts and Sports departments of
the school which in my four years in Senior High School with ninety
students in my graduating class graduated an Opera singer and a reed player in
the Chicago Symphony. Earlier the Yankee baseball
player Mickey Mantle had graduated and my mother taught his wife business
arts. We had three choruses, male, female and mixed and a state
champion concert band as well as speech and drama graduates. My
father believed in teaching vocations so we all learned music, sports, drama and
debate, poetry, woodworking, and others learned auto mechanics along with
the standard three R academic courses. The Math courses
were generally good but I never was but I was a history nut and we all did
geology since we lived in the mines. Here is a picture of my first
house:
As you can see, those tailings that the house was
between are saturated with lead and zinc dust. The Mill across
the street has the stream that even today is considered one of the most polluted
in America with lead/zinc and the heavy metals of radium and
cadmium. But we produced Doctors,
lawyers, artists, teachers, ministers, politicians, nurses etc. far beyond
our numbers. We didn't produce any Mathematicians although we
had a full math program minus calculus. Also no languages other
than English, dictated by the Federal government. However,
even today we have a network around the country of people who survived and
accomplished a great deal in life. This little house may not look
like much but there were people who lived in buildings
like:
This little house was made from crates.
Like the boxes you ship pianos in. I suspect it came from the
heavy machinery in the mines. Poorly insulated with a wood stove and
an "outhouse", the house was next door to the First
Baptist Church. It was inhabited by an old man and was torn
down once he died but I found this picture showing that the house had been there
for forty years of continuous habitation.
My father put together vocational work programs for the
students and they gradually changed the housing on the reservation but not the
pollution. So why were we able to have these programs but
England and much of America can't? For the same reason
that most of the Math programs have been a bust around the country.
Parents don't want advanced math, symbolic logic, physics, etc. because they
don't understand it. They want their kids to add, subtract, multiply
and divide, do geometry and basic algebra but no new math and all of those other
things they don't understand which cause problems in their parental
authority. With drugs and the youth oriented society, this is a
problem. The parents vote with the budget and the school board and
join the conservatives who fight the NEA teachers association and the
Union.
My daughter had pre-calculus in middle
school and I was happy and proud that my daughter could do what the
lead and zinc pollution had robbed from me. But other parents were
very touchy when the Math teacher said that if they didn't understand Symbolic
Logic they would just have to accept that their kids were doing
well. It turned out that he was more than
correct. That school is a magnet school in a neighborhood in
Manhattan with the greatest drug problem in this area of the
city. The kid's high motivation and exceptional instruction in
an inner city school with largely a Black and Hispanic population defies
the stereotypes. We heard about the school and worked to get our
daughter in. We walked her to school to protect her from the drugs
until she knew the ropes and then she walked herself and has no drug
problems.
So what is happening in
England? What economic class goes to your private
schools? Here it is the upper class and the schools are OK to very
fine, however I have seen some terrible musical work in one of the most
expensive schools in New York City. Next to my daughter's school
they are more than inadequate.
>
> Besides supplying about 85% of all musicians, private schools also supply
> about 75% of all scientists and 85% of all mathematicians. In other words,
> without private schools England would collapse economically in very short
> order and would also descend into a condition which the Russian call
> "Nyeculturi".
> Besides supplying about 85% of all musicians, private schools also supply
> about 75% of all scientists and 85% of all mathematicians. In other words,
> without private schools England would collapse economically in very short
> order and would also descend into a condition which the Russian call
> "Nyeculturi".
Why is your Democracy incapable of deciding what
is good curriculum and not? The school my daughter went to in
New York City was a public school and their orchestra played Brahms
symphonies, the theater department put on a Spring Drama Festival with five
professional level plays and the Weil Three Penny Opera. Two
years ago the play was Marat/Sade in the Peter Brook
production. Last year it was Thornton Wilder's Our
Town and a raw, difficult play about the landing of the first convict ship
in Botany Bay Australia. The chorus and vocal department did a
Brahms Requiem, the Liebeslieder Waltzes and Carmina Burana with the school
orchestra. They have one of the finest jazz bands in the
Nation. There is no private school in New York that could
possible compete.
With my choral experience on the reservation and my
daughter's experience here I don't understand what you are saying.
In New York City the three science schools: Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science
and Styvesant High School down by the old World Trade Center site are three of
the finest high schools in science in the world. Their students do
well all over the world. And they are public schools.
One other thing, my daughter had a serious illness in her Junior year in
High School and she studied her New York Regents exam and her SATs with her
friends. I offered but they would have nothing of it. We
paid for a special course on the SATs so that she would not be caught off guard
with the testing process. She did well on both tests without
going to class although she wasn't able to make up the physics and that
showed. She got into a fine college on her own and graduated from
high school with good grades, won a State Award for Character and Scholarship
and has made me very proud in her first year in college. She would
anyway.
My point is that you have to work with your kid and
provide an environment where they can enjoy the motivation that the Creator gave
them naturally. She had the discipline of dance from the age
of three and I gave her voice lessons for a couple of years as well, but her
real desires are in writing and acting. She is in school as a
writer.
You English have a magnificent orchestral system
in London with nine world class orchestras, (New York has one with, two
opera orchestras and two chamber orchestras) over half of the live music
in England is chamber opera and you have as many world class Grand opera
companies in the British Isles as we have in the third largest country on the
planet.
But choruses are all over here. They
are not funded by the schools so much as by the churches where you have choral
programs that literally go cradle to grave and in all styles with a plentitude
of commercial 32 bar song form styles. Schools are hamstrung
with the poor pedagogy of the three R curriculum that is not a performance
curriculum but too academic. Three Rs is really one art and one
academic both very poorly thought through. Still there are
magnificent schools to be had if your students are capable and you are willing
to give the time as a parent to supervise your child's
growth.
The headquarters of the American Choral Directors
Association is in my home state of Oklahoma which should remind you that the
choral program here in the US is grass roots based.
So I guess we are quite a bit different over here in
the education while you have a much better performance program for the arts than
we. Our private structure performance structure is a
total failure. There are no more major opera companies in America
today than when I was in High School and at the time there were five and our
population is 175 million more. But musical commerce has taken over
the radio stations and it is strictly 32 bar primitive. As I said,
music that could be written by an illiterate 14 year old. Several
years back the dancers who are generally more artistically disciplined than the
singers and certainly more creative, started winning composition projects
because they were better at business and working the system than the
musicians. They too were getting composers grants when they were
largely illiterate and unschooled. But they were better with
words having used them in the creation of their choreography and the trained
composers and instrumentalists were not truly trained in the marriage of music
with words. Today we are all working to remedy that situation
in our American Masters Arts Festival Biennial where we stress
the development of complex vocal music products in English.
> I suspect it's much the same in the US.
Nope, we have some fantastic public schools for music
and art as well as science and math. New York City has one
million public school students so you do have schools in all levels of
competence. There is not another system in the country who has even
half as many students. You could put whole middle western
cities in the New York City Subway system and everyone have a seat.
That means that the schools are much smaller elsewhere.
When the parents solve the issue of their relationships
with their own children and I might add the inner child within themselves, then
the schools will respond accordingly. Public Schools have some
spectacular failures and the Music School teachers complain about the talent
coming into their schools and use it as an excuse to take students from Asia who
pay better. However, I then take those same students after
they graduate and find them unusable without my putting hundreds of thousands of
dollars into post graduate education so I could say the same about every single
music conservatory in the city. That doesn't mean they are bad, just
that they don't train their students for work in my
company. They are great for certain things but not
prepared to work fulltime and certainly know nothing at all about the
entrepreneurial work necessary to build artistic products outside a school or
the rare full time company.
However, you still have about a
> dozen world-class universities. We haven't even got those now. Oxford and
> Cambridge have become almost dependent on the State in the last few years
> and have to do as they're told. (Also, another little titbit for you now in
> case you're interested. We now have one PhD student in economics in the
> whole of the country.)
> dozen world-class universities. We haven't even got those now. Oxford and
> Cambridge have become almost dependent on the State in the last few years
> and have to do as they're told. (Also, another little titbit for you now in
> case you're interested. We now have one PhD student in economics in the
> whole of the country.)
Gee whiz. How can that be. I
know a world famous economist who has done his work in the market who is
studying for his PHD in England. Maybe you will have two soon
unless he comes home and I hope he does because he's terrific.
America wouldn't take him in school because he was too old.
REH
>
> Keith Hudson
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
> Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ________________________________________________________________________
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