Sadly, music was once a participatory event, one of joy, elation, or sadness, depending on the occasion. As John Kenneth Galbraith stated in a lecture in at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, "we have gone from a generation of singers of music to a generation of listeners." (a paraphrase from memory...in the quotes.) The fact is stark, you no longer have school choirs in many places, no one sits around the parlour and sings. It survived for a while, but radio, tv, ipods, even record players, although important, have changed the landscape and robbed us of the emotional links our ancestors had to music.

I have purchased and donated many old music books that predate recorded music. They tell a story of a time and an era when music was much different from today. In places it lives on, remote areas of Canada still have family bands, sing a-longs, and ceilidhs. For a while after TV came out, you had sing a-longs, follow the bouncing ball, hymn sing programs, but they too have faded away.

My wife's family being French Canadian still have 8 or 10 occasions a year, rent a hall, and pull out fiddles, guitars, mouth organs, and a caller for the square dances. But that's dying. Everyone is plugged into headphones, oblivious to the world, and lost in some never never land of boom boom.

Music went from the era before print when it was shared, chants were learned, and songs were passed down. It's interesting that many generations of Eskimos on the east side of Hudson's Bay all play fiddle, the old scottish way, learned by rote from the Scots that ran the trading posts. They were filmed and to everyone's surprise the tunes had morphed in Scotland, but were the same in the isolation of Northern Canada.

As the print media evolved so did music. You can trace it's evolution through the dark ages, old songs like When Johnny Comes Marching Home, the older version was far more graphic. Then as the age of enlightenment allowed musicians to be the equal of others rather than virtual slaves eating in the kitchen with the maids and popping out to perform sonatas or new compositions for the 'Lords and Ladies' to the period where Mozart made a stab at music as a business.

As musicians rose in stature, and opera houses and concert halls were built, even the common person could attend the opera. The Victorian era almost killed music, pushed away the ribald songs of the previous era, and pushed very proper hymns into churches. Prohibition had an effect, pushing music and drinking underground. And then as we moved into the age of tv it became about watching someone else, not participating. I've been to clubs with outstanding performers, and the patrons are all watching a football game, wanting the owner to shut down the music and turn up the sports.

Ok, so those are the highlights of observations without the footnotes, my basis of a thesis that is partly written, and of course my viewpoints thrown like autumn leaves on a fall stream, ready to freeze for the winter before going the rest of the way to someplace in the sparkle of clear spring waters....as another year dawns and I try and preserve my families musical heritage....

As the schools are ripping up old songbooks to rid us of Steven Foster, and burning copies of To Kill a Mockingbird in order to ensure political correctness...I wonder who is going to bring back the music.

John Conley
Musica est vita