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Looper's Delight
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----- Original Message ----- From: <SketchyJoe@aol.com> To: <Loopers-Delight@annihilist.com> Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2000 10:25 PM Subject: A loopy education; was:Dripsody > I'm very happy to here that many of us here were exposed to the outer edges > of art at an early age. The Cubist statement, made me laugh as I just > exposed some 10 year old kids to Surrealism today. I will say that as a > music teacher that attempts to open my kids' minds, the process is not as > easy as one would assume. First, I still feel a pressure from my colleagues > and from parents to teach more tradition subject material I have to applaud your work with these kids. They are exactly the right age to be exposed to the stuff-outside- the-box. Ten-year-olds get this stuff so easily because their worldview is yet to be established. The "educationists" in charge of music education in the schools are missing this point in trying to have notation and the "classics" taught in general music classes. Last year I worked up a hands-on gallery installation of Alvin Lucier's "Queen of the South", Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music" and a version of George Brecht's (Fluxus) "Drip Music" for a month long show in Helena, MT. This stuff was the a real stretch for people used to traditional arts. It was an intro to installation music and historically prepared people for Trimpin's "Colonininpurple" which was installed at the Art Museum in the same town. Trimpin is a soundartist/sculptor from Seattle - anyone seen/heard his stuff?). Kids accepted the strewn material vibrating on a leveled set of floor toms driven by a synth that they got to play. In Queen of the South the "notation" is the image patterns that appear on the surface of the drums. They had to explore and try different things and come up with various approaches. The search became the music. A looping mentality that is frankly missing in most music education. In my travels with these pieces I have encountered a lot of support from science teachers because the music brings the notions of resonance, pendulum decay, dopler shift, etc alive and puts them in peoples' hands and not an abstract set of principles in a textbook to be approached theoretically. In the past you would have had trouble with a music supervisor doing these things but with the recent move toward Interdisciplinary Education in educationist circles the science / art / music interface may make that same music sup stand up and take notice and maybe even enjoy the fact that kids are having a great time in the exploration mode. Loop and Learn. I totally agree with Larry Tremblay - hats off to you, SketchyJoe.