{"id":14308,"date":"2012-12-12T14:49:38","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T19:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2012\/12\/12\/14308.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:04:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:04:59","slug":"book-report-how-music-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2012\/12\/12\/book-report-how-music-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: How Music Works"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has been reading David Byrne’s new book How Music Works<\/a>, which is a fascinating book on a whole bunch of levels. The man has thought about music a lot—thought about it, researched it, played it, listened to it, made a living at it. There’s a lot of stuff in here I didn’t know—stuff about him and his bands, and stuff about the business, the way the money flows, the contracts… there’s a lot of just plain old information in here. There’s also a lot of opinion, some of it really provocative. Some of it trite, some of it wrong, some of it brilliant.\n

In other words, it’s a good book. Worth reading, if you are at all interested in music. Particularly his music, of course, but really any modern music at all.\n

Even if you aren’t terribly interested in music, Mr. Byrne’s ideas about music education may interest you—we are, after all, paying for music education at the public schools, even if dilatorily, and the questions of why<\/i> and how<\/i> are important, as are can we do better<\/i> and how would we know<\/i>.\n

As it happens, much of the instrumental music instruction in our schools is geared to the creation of an orchestra able to play some recognizable bits of the classical repertoire. Mr. Byrne doesn’t much like orchestral music, I’m afraid. He doesn’t seem to like the buildings created for it, and he doesn’t like the audience norms it requires, and he doesn’t like the music itself, mostly. He likes the funk. Which is noticeably absent from the instrumental music curriculum in this country.\n

On the face of it, actually, it’s a little odd that (to the extent there is any instrumental music education in our public schools) the students are taught to play Bach and Beethoven and Vivaldi on flute and trombone and cello. These are kids who otherwise would never listen to orchestral music, never listen (intentionally and consciously) to those instruments. And perhaps just as important, their parents, by and large, never listen to that music and those instruments, lack the vocabulary to talk about them or the sophistication to listen carefully to the practicing. Or the concerts. There are arguments to be made for our program, but I think it must be admitted that it is an odd thing.\n

Particularly as there exists American Music—I believe that our middle grade kids have an incredible sophistication with popular music. David Byrne suggests that we teach our kids by, more or less, giving them guitars and keyboards and drum kits and letting them boogie, more or less endorsing the Little Kids Rock<\/a> method. I know nothing about the actual program; I was a Suzuki kid. But it makes sense to me.\n

In fact, I would start out by teaching kids the blues. Simple chord changes, lots of repetition, familiar sound and instrumentation. Teach them the structure. Let them improvise a little. Play them some songs. Let them come up with words of their own.\n

The first line of the blues is always repeated a second time
Oh, the first line of the blues you gotta sing one more time
So when you get to the third you have time to think of a rhyme<\/blockquote>\n

It seems to me that you go from the blues to the Beatles, and then to Irving Berlin and then<\/i> to Bach. But then, you know, I don’t actually know if any recent pop music falls into the blues structure; when I was a kid there were at least some recent recordings of popular musicians that were blues songs, even if they didn’t sound much like them. Learning (as I did eventually, in college) to recognize a blues was a big step in my musical education. Probably a bigger step than learning to play a minuet.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger calls it stormy Wednesday, but Tuesday was just as bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16745,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14308\/revisions\/16745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}