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Iowa Stubborn

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I just re-watched The Music Man on DVD the other night, and I always find the show depressing. Although it’s primarily a love story, we musicians inevitably zero in on the musical elements of a show with music as a main theme. In the final scene, the fraudulent Prof. Harold Hill is trying to conduct a band of untrained kids, and it’s a total mess, since they haven’t learned anything. But the parents are thrilled: “Look at my Johnny!” one of them calls out. The kids are so cute up there the parents are happy regardless of whether their children know anything about music.
 
I’m sure Meredith Willson intended this as another slam on Iowans, who are calumnied throughout the film as ignorant and provincial. But it’s not just Hawkeyes, unfortunately; it’s a regular experience in many children’s programs nowadays. I’ve been to any number of horrible children’s concerts which were hailed as wonderful by many parents. My wife and I refer to this as the “Music Man effect”. I don’t know if it’s caused by low expectations, or just a praise-everything self-esteem booster, but anyway there probably isn’t much we can do about it. Incompetent musicians will keep getting away with directing children’s choirs in schools and churches indefinitely and get patted on the back for great accomplishments.
 
On the plus side, music teachers haven’t adopted Prof. Hill’s “think” system for learning music. It seems to have been widely adopted for teaching math and reading, but I digress….
 
Update: Went to my son’s school music show, and it was worse than Music Man. Dads were sitting in the back row texting on their Blackberries. A solid majority of the kids couldn’t match pitch (5th graders!) so they kind of chanted along with the recorded accompaniments. Admittedly, we knew the music was weak at this school when we enrolled; we’re providing lots of extracurricular music. Hearing a few raps in French is a price we can stand. But anyway, I don’t think this relatively well-educated audience of parents was fooled by this one.
 

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  1. Allen: Sorry to read your reaction to “Music Man.” I have always considered it the most perfect musical theater ever written, partly because Willson was writing an autobiograpical story about his own youth. He KNEW those people, even though in the best tradition of Broadway he turned them into stereotypes.
     
     
    But be that as it may, I’ve never considered Harold Hill anything but a con man–and a very good one!–brought low by love! And as it happens, I know of a very similar man who, a few years earlier, had done much the same thing up in Winnipeg, breezing into town, recruiting a thousand beginning violin students (man, THOSE were the days!), and teaching them in CLASSES (oh, the horror of it all!!!!) not using the “Think System” but using materials that were never allowed to go home with the students. And the only reason I know this true story is that one of the outraged violin teachers happened to be George Bornoff, who was the ONLY one who observed that real teaching was going on in those classes, and who went on to develop an entirely new methodology of class string teaching as a result.
     
     
    But to me, the saddest part of the “Music Man” script has nothing to do with Harold Hill, or even with the gullible townspeople Willson grew up with (after all, “there’s a fool born every minute”!), but with Marion Parue. Obviously an intelligent woman at a time when intelligence was not considered sexy, and presumably a good musician, the Iowa of 1912 (indeed, the entire U.S. of 1912) gave her no opportunities to use her talents beyond running the public library and “giving” piano—both considered suitable occupations for a woman because a man would have no interest in such work! Her mother accepted this without question. Marion herself might have rebelled in a later year, but could not in 1912 Iowa.

    The lesson for today’s female students should rightly be, “yes, we’ve come a long way, baby” (without the nicotine!), and to their male classmates, “don’t tread on me”!!! And from this point of view, “Music Man” is simply a snapshot of one moment in the intertwined developments of music history and feminism that spans centuries. I feel very positive that within my own lifetime women have come to feel entitled to careers in engineering (I have quite a few in my ensemble), medicine (both my daughters-in-law are doctors), and the military (I have a teaching assistant who is at the top of her class AND just auditioned for the U.S. Marine Band—The President’s Own), and not just to “acceptable” women’s work like teaching, secretarying, and yes, “giving” piano!

    Depressed? No way!

    All the best,
    John
     

  2. I remember the day that I realized that my concerts were about teaching the parents of my students what quality choral music should be and could be as much as it was giving my students a chance to show what they have learned.  Most of my kids came to my program because they liked to sing, not because they knew what choral music was, and it became my job to teach them the ‘art of choral music’. In most casses I was teaching the parents what the ‘choral art’ was all about.  And I believe they both learned.

  3. Hi Allen,
     
    I really enjoyed this since “The Music Man ” is one of my favorite musicials and I had a chidlren’s choir for quite a while, myself. “The Music Man” doesn’t depress me, I guess, because I think it shows two kinds of folk –those who keep telling kids and parents they know what they’re doing and the parents who are guillable enough to believe them.  I laugh every time I see it, in every venue.
     
    I stopped directing my children’s choir several years ago because I got tired of parents wanting me to turn their darlings into “Baby-Brittneys” and “Baby-Christinas”—there was no audition for my group but you haven’t  lived until you’ve seen a seven year old belting out “Oops, I did it again” with movements, egged on by their mother!  That soon stopped when I got a hold of them.  My kids could match pitches–even the five year olds–and were developing healthy vocal habits and sang age appropriate repertoire.  I had had it when several parents wanted me to have the kids sing more solos (this was a children’s choir)and  told me I should choose more “modern” pieces.  I found out later a local music school (as in “neighborhood music school”, where they sell guitar strings and give accordian lessons)director had put these ideas into their head.  My program was through a park district fine arts program and was being undermined by the local “Harold Hill”.
     
    Anyway, my hubby and I call those music shows, such as your son’s, “Blood” shows—as in “you only go if you’re related by blood”! Ben, my son the pianist, was a fine cellist also until he started college and got his BM and MM in piano.  I went to many, many string concerts and smiled all the way through until my face hurt.  Fourth grade violinists can be good or they can be, um, “darling”.  These kids did improve as they got older but their parents believed them to be wonderful—I called them “darling”!
     
    A wonderful Choral Blog for a Saturday morning–GO DUKE!
     
    Marie

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