Catching music makers in the act.
O'Shaugnessey wrote "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams..."
On the contact page, I began planting seeds to describe the human act of music making. The following pages described some activities the Merriam school community participates within to make music together. But how does that relate to the real world of musicians? On this page we look to link our school community with the world community of musicians, to find the common bonds of music making we share with those of the rest of the world in which we live. So let's go on a treasure hunt!
Every day, musicianship is found everywhere in the world. To find it where it lives and thrives, and to find the value of joyous community music makers is the treasure quest.
In every community worldwide, there are certain things that make us common neighbors in a world that seems to separate us from one another by border or language or culture. Through singing and playing instruments, drawing and painting, writing, theorizing, hypothesizing, discovering, humanity communicates inner most values and thoughts and dreams to others. To ignore music, or art, or any art like writing, mathematics, history, is to deny and devalue what makes humanity unique and special.
Can you imagine living every day of your life without hearing any music? I mean really. No radio, iPod, commercial jingles, movie scores, teen music hero's, favorite instruments, favorite musical artists...humming...nothing related to sound beyond our regular human speech? (And due to how the brain works, if there is no music, there most likely is no speech.)
Speech is made up of a rhythmic texture to spoken sound. It is based on the brain organizing the rhythmic sound information into identifiable meaning and sending it back out in the same or similar rhythmic pattern. This is why reading starts out hard when we are young as we strive to match the symbols of sounds with the rhythms of the sounds we have heard. Until we are facile in decoding, there is a disconnect between sight and sound and reading is hard. But once we develop facility in recognizing a word/symbol and connecting that symbol with the way it sounds, our eyes suddenly "hear" the words we are reading and we find the process of reading much more like listening to the words on the page than scanning and looking at them to recognize their meaning.
Spoken language in any culture has a rhythm and pace to it. From the rapid fire consonant filled staccato of Spanish, to the languid vowel filled tempos of Polynesian, the rhythm, pitch and expression of language is what we respond when learning to speak or learning a new language. Without the rhythm of language, the accent, the articulation, the scansion that makes the unique expression of a word within a rhythmic context, meaning is harder to ascertain. Those early computer voices "buzz-spea-king-each-syl-a-ble-the-same-pitch-length-as-the-last-and-next" did nothing but cause someone in computer science to invent a better algorithm to make a more humanlike and rhythmic speech pattern. A musical result - right Siri? And that is what we really teach when reading - not what the word LOOKS like but what the word SOUNDS like. Until it SOUNDS right, we are not reading. And when we ARE reading, and especially when reading aloud, we are forming the rhythmic, pitched and expressive sounds called LANGUAGE - just another form of music.
Since speech is an outgrowth of sound and music, it can be argued that Speech and the ability to speak and communicate is found only in those who are musical. And that makes ALL people around the world special - we are ALL a common band of musicians.
All around the world, people automatically and continually go the next step beyond speech to find may ways of making music together. In Playing, Singing, Reading, Writing, Listening to and Moving to music, we participate daily together in a world wide concert. Even without iPods or store-bought instruments, there are music makers, purists who don't just plug in, or turn on, but tune in to each other and in groups to make or participate in music making activities for the most human of reasons - for the sheer joy of doing so. Many join no formal group, but spontaneously erupt into music making with each other that create and forge a community bond simply from the act of creating shared sound.
THIS page is devoted to these people.
When I travel, I am on the lookout to witness and record spontaneous music makers or surprise events of playing, singing, reading, writing, listening or moving to music. I have put some of those events onto this page. Some are more formal than others, but the true treasures are the ones, like this first group below, who erupt into expressive song and movement.
This page is a collection of music making by regular people like you and me from places I visit in travel. It is a record, a collection, of human musicians found in their natural musical habitat. I invite you to determine on your own where the purest gold is found here.
On the contact page, I began planting seeds to describe the human act of music making. The following pages described some activities the Merriam school community participates within to make music together. But how does that relate to the real world of musicians? On this page we look to link our school community with the world community of musicians, to find the common bonds of music making we share with those of the rest of the world in which we live. So let's go on a treasure hunt!
Every day, musicianship is found everywhere in the world. To find it where it lives and thrives, and to find the value of joyous community music makers is the treasure quest.
In every community worldwide, there are certain things that make us common neighbors in a world that seems to separate us from one another by border or language or culture. Through singing and playing instruments, drawing and painting, writing, theorizing, hypothesizing, discovering, humanity communicates inner most values and thoughts and dreams to others. To ignore music, or art, or any art like writing, mathematics, history, is to deny and devalue what makes humanity unique and special.
Can you imagine living every day of your life without hearing any music? I mean really. No radio, iPod, commercial jingles, movie scores, teen music hero's, favorite instruments, favorite musical artists...humming...nothing related to sound beyond our regular human speech? (And due to how the brain works, if there is no music, there most likely is no speech.)
Speech is made up of a rhythmic texture to spoken sound. It is based on the brain organizing the rhythmic sound information into identifiable meaning and sending it back out in the same or similar rhythmic pattern. This is why reading starts out hard when we are young as we strive to match the symbols of sounds with the rhythms of the sounds we have heard. Until we are facile in decoding, there is a disconnect between sight and sound and reading is hard. But once we develop facility in recognizing a word/symbol and connecting that symbol with the way it sounds, our eyes suddenly "hear" the words we are reading and we find the process of reading much more like listening to the words on the page than scanning and looking at them to recognize their meaning.
Spoken language in any culture has a rhythm and pace to it. From the rapid fire consonant filled staccato of Spanish, to the languid vowel filled tempos of Polynesian, the rhythm, pitch and expression of language is what we respond when learning to speak or learning a new language. Without the rhythm of language, the accent, the articulation, the scansion that makes the unique expression of a word within a rhythmic context, meaning is harder to ascertain. Those early computer voices "buzz-spea-king-each-syl-a-ble-the-same-pitch-length-as-the-last-and-next" did nothing but cause someone in computer science to invent a better algorithm to make a more humanlike and rhythmic speech pattern. A musical result - right Siri? And that is what we really teach when reading - not what the word LOOKS like but what the word SOUNDS like. Until it SOUNDS right, we are not reading. And when we ARE reading, and especially when reading aloud, we are forming the rhythmic, pitched and expressive sounds called LANGUAGE - just another form of music.
Since speech is an outgrowth of sound and music, it can be argued that Speech and the ability to speak and communicate is found only in those who are musical. And that makes ALL people around the world special - we are ALL a common band of musicians.
All around the world, people automatically and continually go the next step beyond speech to find may ways of making music together. In Playing, Singing, Reading, Writing, Listening to and Moving to music, we participate daily together in a world wide concert. Even without iPods or store-bought instruments, there are music makers, purists who don't just plug in, or turn on, but tune in to each other and in groups to make or participate in music making activities for the most human of reasons - for the sheer joy of doing so. Many join no formal group, but spontaneously erupt into music making with each other that create and forge a community bond simply from the act of creating shared sound.
THIS page is devoted to these people.
When I travel, I am on the lookout to witness and record spontaneous music makers or surprise events of playing, singing, reading, writing, listening or moving to music. I have put some of those events onto this page. Some are more formal than others, but the true treasures are the ones, like this first group below, who erupt into expressive song and movement.
This page is a collection of music making by regular people like you and me from places I visit in travel. It is a record, a collection, of human musicians found in their natural musical habitat. I invite you to determine on your own where the purest gold is found here.