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The Radio 3 Boards > General Chat > News And Current Affairs > Nicholas Hytner: "Schools to blame for generation unable to understand Arts"
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Author Topic: Nicholas Hytner: "Schools to blame for generation unable to understand Arts"  (Read 428 times)
richard barrett
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« Reply #15 on: 00:25:36, 17-04-2008 »
Quote from: martle on 22:46:02, 16-04-2008
neither can they think critically, analyse, make comparative judgements or demonstrate any kind of comparative musical knowledge.
This is the crucial point, no matter what kind of music it is that's being studied.
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #16 on: 00:42:47, 17-04-2008 »
Quote from: richard barrett on 00:25:36, 17-04-2008
Quote from: martle on 22:46:02, 16-04-2008
neither can they think critically, analyse, make comparative judgements or demonstrate any kind of comparative musical knowledge.
This is the crucial point, no matter what kind of music it is that's being studied.
The difficulty is (with a nod in the direction of Turfan Fragment's comments on the racism thread) that if the syllabus is broad, encompassing a wide range of music, then it's hard to give enough time to any one thing, such as would be necessary to make intelligent comparative judgements. Making them on the basis of a handful of surface features is quite a different thing.
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
Reiner Torheit
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« Reply #17 on: 04:27:57, 17-04-2008 »
By way of a change of viewpoint, here is a rather interesting piece (from The Age) selling the idea of a rich cultural heritage as a national treasure, and even terming it "soft power":

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/reviving-a-creative-nation/2008/04/15/1208025185681.html
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"I was, for several months, mutely in love with a coloratura soprano, who seemed to me to have wafted straight from Paradise to the stage of the Odessa Opera-House"
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ahinton
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« Reply #18 on: 07:25:50, 17-04-2008 »
Quote from: Ian Pace on 00:20:51, 17-04-2008
When we talk about 'appreciation of the Arts', what exactly do we mean? Are we in danger of limiting the idea of 'the Arts' to a certain conception of 'high culture', especially in the case of music? After all, plenty of young people know a lot about, and appreciate (sometimes with quite intricate forms of discernment and notions of cultural meaning) popular music, but they wouldn't be categorised as having such 'appreciation'. Musical education has had to take account of this, and consider the fact that the various skills involved both for performers and listeners of these other musics at least deserve serious consideration of their own alongside the more traditional 'musical values'.

Learning soprano, alto, tenor, bass clefs is one thing, but mightn't learning tablature notation for the guitar be equally if not more important? And being able to improvise over a basic riff as important as doing traditional keyboard harmony? And knowing about 1960s Motown as important as knowing what Stockhausen or Nono were doing in the same period?

I'm continually in two minds about these issues, not at all claiming to have definitive solutions.
Good points for the most part - and good that you reveal your understandably vacillatory position vis-à-vis such things; I wonder if the fact that you cannot claim to have definitive solutions (any more than I can) might possibly be due in part to the fact that there simply aren't any that will reliably admit of general practical application in society, in that knowledge and experience of so very much music of so many different kinds and disciplines is so easily available to us all today that the core problem of trying to embrace them all in an educational environment might actually be one of potential information overload?
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IgnorantRockFan
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« Reply #19 on: 14:28:13, 17-04-2008 »
Quote from: Reiner Torheit on 23:31:22, 16-04-2008
Are we right, or are we the old fogeys in tweedy jackets with leather elbow-patches, still using log-tables and slide-rules when a pocket calculator costs £1.99 in Tesco?   Why did we learn to score-read at the piano from soprano, alto, tenor and bass clefs? 

Certainly in mathematics, if you can't use log tables and slide rules then you will never be able to do anything more advanced than the adding up which a £1.99 calculator will do for you. To do anything important in mathematics, you need the underlying theoretical understanding that a calculator can't give you but a knowledge of logorithms can.

I don't know, but I would guess the same is true in music?



Nurse! Pass the leather elbow-patches!  Grin
« Last Edit: 14:35:13, 17-04-2008 by IgnorantRockFan » Logged
Allegro, ma non tanto
oliver sudden
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« Reply #20 on: 14:32:22, 17-04-2008 »
Quote from: IgnorantRockFan on 14:28:13, 17-04-2008
I don't know
Oh of course you do, you're just pretending. Wink
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