The debasement of musical taste involved in the rock and roll hysteria should give English teachers something to think about. Whether we're thrilled by the prospect or not, it is generally true that we provide most students with their only consistent contact with "cultural" traditions and standards in their school experience. It seems to me that the real significance of rock and roll is that this is what happens when irresponsible disc jockeys usurp our function as critics of culture, popular and elite.
The unexamined life is not worth living, and unexamined lives are precisely what our students lead in respect to popular music. They could be analyzing this use of their leisure in their class themes and oral reports. If they are not given this opportunity to clarify their choices and values in the quiet of the classroom, the cynical promoters and glib opportunists from the slums of popular music will victimize them. And then we are supposed to teach them literature after their sensibilities have been bludgeoned and blunted by that calculated racket.
Many teachers probably still think that creative popular music--jazz--(of which rock and roll is a perverted distortion) is beneath serious consideration. If they do, they should read "Two Views of Jazz" by Dave Brubeck, a literate, articulate jazz pianist, and by Daniel G. Hoffman, a member of the English Department at Columbia University, in Perspectives USA #15 (New Directions, 333 Sixth Ave., NYC, $1.50).
This journal has been sponsored by the Ford Foundation to provide nationals of other countries a chance to understand the nature and dynamics of American cultural life. It is not being facetious to suggest that too many Americans are foreigners when it comes to our own cultural life, and in a direct sense, this magazine is as relevant for them as for a native of, say, Turkey.
These two thoughtful essays should be followed by Nat Hentoff's brilliant plea to jazz musicians and audiences for a respect for tradition, "New Audiences and Old Jazzmen," Saturday Review (September 15, 1956). And while in that issue, don't miss Francis Fergusson's examination of another promising aspect of America's musical culture, "Broadway's Musical Hullabaloo: It's Popular, Profitable, Professional . . . But Is It Art?"
This kind of background reading is evidence (even if only by default) that the English teacher must help students examine, through themes, oral reports, term papers, and the other traditional instruments of explication and self-analysis, the musical life of their times.
Rock and roll symbolizes the kind of cultural instability that comes from ignoring in school the formative influence of popular culture on the adolescent.
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1 comment:
This is ridiculous. An innovator like Cage hated Jazz and preferred RR to it. Jazz can simplified as 1-
locked into a rhythm and 2- "exercise" level 1 exposition of scales even though they may be interesting modes.
RR at least has no pretense! Jazz' main feature is the variety that can be achieved from essential similar small combos.
Or take a confrere of McLuhan - Glen Gould who took music from the concert hall to the studio. Where did he end his musical longings- in essentially Spoken Word documentaries.
It's not the forms of music I think that are one way or another, it's the brain washed student who has no critical awareness. And the brain washing is a failure to understand the stilted sensorium effects! yus in zappa, vareese, slominsky, beatles, dylan, coltrane,crowe, some Mozart (his songs)the last poets etc...
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