This really hits upon something that struck me recently. I was reading a biography of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and it discussed how his evening tradition growing up in late 1800s Wisconsin was to play music as a family. Each person played an instrument and after dinner they’d sit together playing music. And FLW insisted on keeping up this tradition when he got old and famous.
It struck me that radio and tv and now internet have really turned us into such passive consumers. Without that entertainment families were forced to entertain themselves, they created music together, and this wasn’t seen as a strange aberration, but just something people did back then. In this day and age it’s probably an extinct way of spending time as a family
This made Me think of Diary of a Wimpy kid. There’s a joke in that book (and the movie) that Susan wants the family to be a band, and Greg is horrified by the thought of performing with his embarassing family. So that’s our cultural norm in the 21st century, that’s the story we tell about family music.
But that old tradition can be revived by parents. All they have to do is learn the instruments and teach their children. For so many families, making music together is an idle dream, but it’s not that hard to do it. We just have passive parents who don’t teach their kids this stuff.
I dunno, gold miners during the San Francisco gold rush would entertain each other by performing Shakespeare plays from memory. Working class people are a lot more culturally alienated now than they used to be.
People simply stopped learning to play music because recorded music became more accessible.
Oh well, guess I was at least somewhat wrong. Man I wish my grandparents were still alive so I could ask them about this. Call your grandparents while you still have them, people
I concur. My grandparents were farmers born in the early 1910s. Their daily life was so different from ours that it’s sometimes difficult to comprehend. They both lived without electricity until their twenties. Taking turns to wake up early to start a fire each morning was normal.
Even the piano. I’m a pianist from a long line of them, and my ancestors were all poor as fuck farmers. My grandmother even played in regional competitions at a time when they still had no electricity. Life was quite different back then.
Absolutely. I did not intend to paint an over simplistic picture of who could play what. Just thought that those two instruments readily evoked a past where people often even took musical instruments wherever they traveled and occupied themselves with music on the road, on work breaks et cetera. Like you say, it was a different time. And music and dance are extremely universal methods of expressing yourselves and fostering community.
I don’t think you over simplified it at all. The families even poorer than mine wouldn’t have had a piano, but instead something inexpensive, like you suggested. A lot of folk music originates from poor communities, which required them to have instruments of some kind.
This really hits upon something that struck me recently. I was reading a biography of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and it discussed how his evening tradition growing up in late 1800s Wisconsin was to play music as a family. Each person played an instrument and after dinner they’d sit together playing music. And FLW insisted on keeping up this tradition when he got old and famous.
It struck me that radio and tv and now internet have really turned us into such passive consumers. Without that entertainment families were forced to entertain themselves, they created music together, and this wasn’t seen as a strange aberration, but just something people did back then. In this day and age it’s probably an extinct way of spending time as a family
This made Me think of Diary of a Wimpy kid. There’s a joke in that book (and the movie) that Susan wants the family to be a band, and Greg is horrified by the thought of performing with his embarassing family. So that’s our cultural norm in the 21st century, that’s the story we tell about family music.
But that old tradition can be revived by parents. All they have to do is learn the instruments and teach their children. For so many families, making music together is an idle dream, but it’s not that hard to do it. We just have passive parents who don’t teach their kids this stuff.
I don’t think that everybody in e.g. worker families used to know how you play an instrument before the radio.
I dunno, gold miners during the San Francisco gold rush would entertain each other by performing Shakespeare plays from memory. Working class people are a lot more culturally alienated now than they used to be.
People simply stopped learning to play music because recorded music became more accessible.
FLW grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. So these were farmers in the late 1800s. I think his mother was a school teacher. So pretty average people
Oh well, guess I was at least somewhat wrong. Man I wish my grandparents were still alive so I could ask them about this. Call your grandparents while you still have them, people
I concur. My grandparents were farmers born in the early 1910s. Their daily life was so different from ours that it’s sometimes difficult to comprehend. They both lived without electricity until their twenties. Taking turns to wake up early to start a fire each morning was normal.
What, like, you don’t believe in the fiddle or the harmonica?
Even the piano. I’m a pianist from a long line of them, and my ancestors were all poor as fuck farmers. My grandmother even played in regional competitions at a time when they still had no electricity. Life was quite different back then.
Absolutely. I did not intend to paint an over simplistic picture of who could play what. Just thought that those two instruments readily evoked a past where people often even took musical instruments wherever they traveled and occupied themselves with music on the road, on work breaks et cetera. Like you say, it was a different time. And music and dance are extremely universal methods of expressing yourselves and fostering community.
I don’t think you over simplified it at all. The families even poorer than mine wouldn’t have had a piano, but instead something inexpensive, like you suggested. A lot of folk music originates from poor communities, which required them to have instruments of some kind.