We don’t know how to listen

Comments

1. Mary Jane Phillips says

   March 25, 2010 at 1:14 pm

   Hallelujah!  Couldn’t have said it better…..

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2. Ronald Richard Duquette says

   March 25, 2010 at 5:51 am

   A lovely, and very powerful article.  It is sad, though, to think that the assaults on music in the schools is done for an entirely soulless reason – money, or the lack thereof.  I like to point out that it’s the “bean counters” (bureaucrats) and their fellow-travelers, politicians, who ultimately make the decisions about keeping or driving out (not too strong a phrase) music from the schools.  And why does this happen?  Because music doesn’t make “beans” – you can’t count it, like cold, hard, cash (which sports, presumably, can bring in – although we have to wonder why parents, who, having paid so much in taxes, also have to keep digging into their pockets to pay for sports teams – ever wonder about that?); it doesn’t “bend metal” (so you have a physical result, like sculpture or “making something”); it’s defended by people who obviously are inherently somehow defective because this entirely impractical matter called “music” means something special to them.  And so this noisy, threatening-to-be-soulless society of ours fears silence, fears music, fears confronting itself in a moment of suspension that doesn’t involving whirling frantic activity – and banishes/ignores/condemns the language that would liberate them from all those fears – music.  All we can do is introduce our children (“our” in the sense of whatever ones we have any responsibility for, whether of our blood or of our minds (schools) or of our souls (churches)) to music in the way this terrific teacher did – by stepping outside of the noisy, the immediate, the concrete, and introducing them at every possible moment to the evanescent, the eternal, the glorious.  We need to make “moments of silence” in our homes that don’t have TVs playing, no radios or iPods blaring, no artificial noise being made – so we can listen.  Think of it:  this generation loses more of its hearing by age 20 than the previous generations lost by age 40 – and it’s not just the volume of the noise that they listen to the rest of us can hear – it’s especially in the ear-buds, frequently turned up to such a painful level that you have to wonder how the kids (and the ear-buds) continue to function – I know I couldn’t.  How many of us could go an hour without the TV/radio/computer making noises?  Do we wonder our young people don’t know how to listen?  This is also, incidentally, a generation that doesn’t know how to read – really read – and reading takes quiet, takes concentration, takes thought.  Think of it….

    

   Ron Duquette

   Ft. Belvoir, VA

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