riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (11/20/84)
Support the music program in your local public school system.
I am a jazz fan for the pure and simple reason that when I was in the sixth
grade somebody put a trombone in my hands and told me I could learn to play
it. By the time I was in the eighth grade I was playing in my junior high
school stage band. By the end of the ninth grade I had given up the trombone,
but I had gotten hooked for life on listening to jazz. If I had never tried
to learn to play it, I doubt that jazz would be anything to me today but
semi-musical noise.
In my opinion, this is the main purpose of arts programs in the public
schools: not to create future artists, but to create a future audience.
Understanding of any art form more subtle than the top 40 doesn't just fall
from the sky; you have to work at it. The most effective way to work at it, I
think, is to try your own hand at learning to be a producer of art and not
just a consumer, preferably while you're still young. (Why do you think that
spectator sports are such a big deal? Because of all the people who spend
their formative years in participator sports, that's why.)
Of course, an additional bonus is that some small portion of the kids who play
at being artists will grow up to be the real thing. I'm told that New Orleans
now has a crop of young home-grown jazz musicians, the first jazz players to
really come out of the black community there in many decades. Part of the
reason is supposedly a youth orchestra formed by one of the black churches ten
or fifteen years ago. Without that base, jazz even in its birthplace would be
just a tourist industry cut off from most of the people there.
--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle