Epiphenomenia - Teaching a Music Lesson

I taught some music lessons at the primary school of my children these days. It had been a long time since I stood in front of groups of small children, I normally teach students between 20 and 30 now. So I will not deny I was slightly nervous. Would I still be able to handle them? Would they pick up what I had thought out for them, or would my ideas be completely misdirected? Would I have lost touch with teaching children or still be able to do the trick?

I will be honest: I was kind of satisfied, but not because I gave them great tuition. I kind of still could do the trick; what I did was okay, but probably more in the sense of "okay" like many parents who can teach an "okay"  lesson when asked to teach children about their work. I could teach them the lesson not so much as a music pedagogue but as a musicologist having a fun talk and a nice song with a classroom of kids.

Eine kleine Eismusik

There was ice, the last two weeks. That means several things. Apart from the fact that our country, traffic-wise, turns into a complete chaos - as I described earlier - many people are suddenly completely focused on outdoor skating. People who seldom go to skate on indoor ice rinks suddenly feel the urge to skate in the open, on `natural ice', as we say - either a rather limited round on a pond-like outdoor skating rink, or a proper tour over our canals and lakes.

I used to skate a lot (one year even up to three times a week - nothing else to do in the evenings) but fell out of that habit when starting a family 7 years ago. And this was about the first time in those 7 years I went out skating by myself. I had been on skates various times the past few years, but only on small ponds in order to help the kids getting used to being on ice. But now I could do an afternoon of skating by myself.

Marktzicht - Kylie Minogue on ice

When we arrived in café Marktzicht to play a gig, after a 45 minutes drive in the frost and with some fog, we heard that the weather conditions had led to a "code orange" from some authority. Meaning: stay at home if you do not necessarily have to go out. So we played for a small audience. But cosy.

Of course, anywhere else in the world people will laugh their heads off. A bit of fog at -8 Celsius, what's the big deal? Life is dangerous because eventually you'll die. But the fact is that in this country a bit of snow inevitably leads to a complete grinding halt of pubic life, mainly because so many people inhabit so few square kilometres. One incident on any railway line leads to a chain reaction with enormous consequences because the train schedule is so busy; and one accident at a slightly snowy highway leads to a national traffic jam because too many people drive in too many cars on too few highways. And in order to prevent complaints on all that - for the Dutch love to complain - authorities sometimes give "codes orange" at the slightest breeze. Which leads to complaints, of course - and also nót giving code orange leads to complaints, by the way.

So there we were, in café Marktzicht, feeling as if we were a chosen lot put together by rough weather circumstances and making the best of it. Snowed in for weeks, that feeling. And the fact that the audience spoke Frisian and we sang our songs in Frisian felt fitting. Friesland is connected with winters - it is the most northern part of the country, it boasts a great skating history, and its name is Freezeland after all.

Adding to that was the fact that our singer only two days ago disappeared in an ice hole on a skating tour on a far too thin layer of ice on one of the lakes near Groningen. Some people need to skate as soon as there is some ice somewhere. When his wife complained, our singer said rather grumpily that he had done nothing wrong. After all, hadn't he stopped his skating tour and went home after climbing out of the ice hole, where normally he would have skated on in wet clothes as he always did in his youth ("I'd put my skating cap in my trousers to prevent the freezing of vital parts, though")? Frisian guy, him.

So when we sang our version of Kylie Minogue's great "Can't Get You Out of My Head", which we turned into a song about nostalgia for the days when Friesland's monster 200-kilometre skating tour was organised regularly (days that have never existed but are a favorite nostalgia-target nevertheless), a song with lots of rain and ice holes in it, it added to the pleasure of an imagined winter's night in a pub in Friesland.

And basically, that's what we do when we play with the band - imagining. We go somewhere and change the place into something else for a couple of hours. I never know in what we change the place precisely, because that's different for every individual present. But when we succeed in changing the place for enough people in the audience, then the place changes also for us.

Or at least for me.

That's why I'm in it.

Ethno

It is rumored that a very deep humming sound permeates the soundscape of western life. Where it comes from nobody knows. Some people point at the sewerage system under our streets. I don't hear the sound, luckily. Because people say that once you have noticed it, you never get rid of it. The rest of your life, you hear a maddening hum.

Learning theorists might be tempted to call the point where on starts hearing the hum a transformative learning experience. Never again will life be as it was. Your frame of reference - in this case your auditory frame of reference - has switched fundamentally.

I think I recently went through something like it.

The Voice of Holland

The Voice of Holland is over. Iris Kroes has won – a 19-year old harp-playing communication student of the university I happen to work for.  I hope the university will be proud of her and will congratulate her officially and publicly. Someone who has won a national competition with so many voters deserves that.

I have been watching the Voice of Holland on and off. And I liked it. It is, of course, a hugely orchestrated media event.  And the negative messages about the contracts the participants had to sign are serious, I think (although I think people over 18 should realize the value of their signature before they sign anything – that is the reason why I will not look at the children-version of the Voice of Holland, knowing that there is a huge psychological difference between people signing for themselves or parents signing on behalf of their children). And then some people think it a problem that this is a hugely commercial event. Yes, money is earned by some people, of course.

But I liked it.

The Amazing Invisibility of Dutch Indigenous Music

I owe you a sequel to an entry of some time ago.In that entry, "Defining World Music", I defined World music as "the kind of music that, due to statements on the possibility to identify its sound as connected to a certain specific geographic origin, offers itself as being referred to as exotic and sold as such in some part of the western(ized) world". (I already admitted it was a definition that needed some tidying up, yes, thank you.) And I stressed the exoticizing element in the definition, which makes it possible to for instance sell the English folk revival as World music in the rest of the world - and as a consequence in England as well.


As I wrote earlier, I am a reader of the World music magazine Songlines. I remember that in one of the editorials some time ago, the editor was amazed that there was no such thing as a noticeable Dutch folk music revival within the World music scene, whereas in England the third folk music revival is well on its way by now. Someone specialized in the English folk scene whom I asked whence this difference suggested that it might be explained by the different situations in the Netherlands and the UK - in the UK the English feel kind of marginalised, with the recent installment of Scottish parliament and things like that, so they badly need their proper music. The Dutch don't have comparable problems. Dutch music is ideologically useless, therefor it doesn't exist (the same used to be true of "Dutch identity", by the way, but Geert Wilders is capitalizing on that by now).

Why do we want to become ever better?

One of the questions on my mind those days: as soon as people start to play an instrument they enter a domain in which it is taken for granted that they want to become better, and better, and better at it - better mainly meaning "higher, faster, louder". And they often start to judge the music they listen to in that terms. The power of music as a craft.

But why? Why is it so "natural" that people enter in this very specific relationship with music? Is it "natural"? Is it "cultural"? Is it both?

Tell me if you know an answer that says more than "that's the way human beings are".