A nice pic found through GG's Arts & Literature Daily link:



What do Semele and semicolon have in common? They both sound similar and appear on the same page o' Waffles.

Baz, I've occasionally suspected you might be living in a different century from the rest of us but I never realised you were so advanced.

Fair points, perhaps, but it's the shrinking knowledge base of the students in question that worries me: I think a student today learning about Monteverdi at college is likely to encounter Madonna for him/herself in the outside world, just as I did. The reverse is less likely.

Yes, and they should learn as well as encounter. But they need to encounter in the first place.

I believe students should be taught transferable skills which they can apply to gain a critical understanding of whatever they encounter (including what they encounter in non-academic contexts). But those 'learning about' skills are sharpened by 'encounters' with a wider range of things, which means making the extra effort to show them what is not in their everyday world.

I'm glad my education equipped me with the tools to analyse the world around me, but I would have felt rather short-changed if it hadn't also shown me that there are other worlds. I think that's what the Pauline Kael quote was getting at.


Oh dear! Thank you, Mary. I don't think I've ever done that before in my life.

I have no idea, nor could anyone know that. But this canonical view of music is a relatively recent invention, and a throughgoing celebration of a wide range of music from feudal eras even more so - how many musicians in the early 19th century had heard much Monteverdi? And were they so impoverished as a result? And how much non-classical music was taught when you were at university (and how much did you teach)? Were students then not equally impoverished if they did not learn about that?

And as I implied before, Madonna may still be active and in vogue at the moment (though certainly less so than in previous decades), but that will not always be true, and young people may not encounter her work so casually.

Or Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield or Vera Lynn.  Yawning gaps in knowledge of musical history.

The mileage on my car went into six figures yesterday and I missed it.

Well, I would like to see you make a case to today's students of how they will be enriched by knowing Monteverdi, any more than by knowing the above-mentioned figures.

Right. There's also the fact that music from other historical periods is a document of the worldviews and societies of those periods, and in some ways tells us as much as if not more than "facts and dates" about which aspects of humanity change more rapidly, which more slowly, and in which directions, over the course of historical time, if one's education (including self-education) has encouraged a sensitivity to these things. Such insights not only have a fascination of their own but also contribute to our understanding of ourselves. My feeling is that the history of Western music (to name only this) is worth studying and absorbing for this reason alone. I don't think it's necessary to say that Monteverdi is "better than" or "no better than" Madonna. Such binary comparisons are crass. One of the purposes of musical education is to encourage the individual to make up his/her own mind about such things, as t-i-n says.

Edit: this isn't altogether waffly, sorry about that, it's past my bedtime too.