04.27.2002 || 00h26

A night of musical frustration

Ugh. Had a frustrating conversation to-night with a lovely girl about the violin. I mentioned how weird the modern method of playing is, and she said that I have to understand that this *isn't* modern, it's the classical style that's been around for hundreds of years.

Prolly wouldn't have bugged me so much if I hadn't already been subjected to a load of middle-class crap about what music should be and how many people are embracing the classical methods of making music and yadda yadda yadda.

So simple for suburban kids who can afford to spend tens of thousands to become irrelevant. I don't care if it takes you a decade or two of expensive lessons to become what the academics consider an expert, because That's just another example of academia ensuring its own survival.

It was also troubling to see how ingrained this 'anything-pre-classical/baroque/whatever-we-teach-is-crap' attitude becomes.

Guys, it's simple, basic knowledge: the modern era goes from the end of the Middle Ages to about 1945 (Which is why people like Shakespeare used a variant of English known as 'Early Modern English'). In that time, the violin developped from stringed instruments that had been imported earlier from Asia, and that were generally played on the knee like the Chinese violin. Gradually, as the number of strings increased and various body shapes evolved, an alternate style of playing against the crook of the arm or the shoulder developped (specifically the viola da braccio, which was the instrument that directly developped into the violin), which gradually became the weird shoulder balance of Baroque, then the style we currently see employed (with the chinrests and shoulder rests and alladat).

This is *not* a folky, fiddler thing; this is musical history, flavoured with a basic knowledge of what the words 'modern age' actually means.

It is also proof that you can blow tens of thousands of dollars to remain absolutely ignorant of where the stuff you know about actually originated. I mean, dude: I learned this stuff from pure curiosity when I took up the fiddle; Going through your bachelor's in music and not knowing it is unforgivable.

There was, however, no way I was going to take on the years of musical moudling she went through. It's not in my interest. But it's stuff like that that always makes me do the same thing: if someone asks 'can you read music?' I always answer 'not enough to hurt my playing.'



||Gods save the Queen,
||cf

back || forth

older shite

One last little note... - 09.21.2006

de-stressing, biking and terrorism - 06.06.2006

Mildly stressed... - 05.29.2006

More crime stupidity - 05.28.2006

Scary stuff - 05.25.2006

diaryland.com
Oh yeah, the page and everything
on it is �2000 - 2005 to me, alright ?
don't copy without asking.