On 07/08/12 09:59, Len Ovens wrote:
On Mon, August 6, 2012 2:57 pm, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
I suspect the percentage of people actively recording and performing
music is a lot lower. Back in Bach's time, everyone was expected to
be able to sing, for instance.
citation? i seriously doubt this. perhaps the more monied classes, but
not the population as whole.
not sure about the monied bit ... singing is cheap, and many people take some
part in social activities ... with or without money.
plus singing and music have been part of rituals almost everywhere, including
church ones in christian places ... and in that time church was very much part
of most peoples life. Or here in Australia music and dance has been an important
way of keeping stories and history told for maybe 50 thousand years. Some say
that the big animals that became extinct soon after people first arrived here
are still recorded in those songs, but also much more recent history is to ... a
show I was involved with a few years ago had a series of traditional pieces from
the islands north of Darwin, and one depicted the bombing of the station there
by Japanese planes on their way to Darwin. The dancers depicted planes and the
action in exactly the same style as they had depicted the animals in the other
stories, this dance was 50 or 60 years old when I saw it. Everyone takes part in
those occasions, in many cultures.
There is a fascinating chapter at the start of:
"The Information: : A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick, 2011
describing the music/language of the talking drums in parts of africa - how the
way the 2 tones of the drums are used to encode news and information in a way
that has lots of redundancy and built in error correction so the message can be
passed through many hands and not get confused along the way. The drummers
certainly had quite a lot of training, but the intricate encoding was read by
everyone. Music plays a lot of different roles, it is a very old part of human
culture.
Simon
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