leaderboard1 -

In the Wind. . . .

December 3, 2015
Default

Meeting the future

This weekend, Wendy and I drove to Massachusetts to visit our new grandson. Samuel John Vichiett-Bishop was born last Thursday (October 22) at 3:45 p.m., weighing 3.45 kilograms (7.61 pounds), the second son of my second son Christopher and his wife Alessandra. Big brother Benjamin is almost three years old, a turbo-charged, bright-eyed, bilingual beauty. (Alex is Brazilian so they speak Portuguese at home.) Sam is just big enough to rest in my two cupped hands. His feet are about the size of my thumbs, and his toes are like the little peas in snow pea pods. The whole thing is magical, remarkable, moving, and inspiring.

Three years ago when we were anticipating Ben’s birth, I was looking forward to the rite of passage of becoming a grandfather. But as those who know me have heard me say, I was not prepared for the joy of seeing my son as a father. And yesterday, watching Chris confidently scoop up the teeny boy, and seeing Chris and Alex as a team preparing for Sam’s first few weeks, discussing schedules about daycare and medical appointments, all while managing Ben’s rambunctious motions, I was simply bursting with pride.

Then, driving home to New York, listening to news reports about national and international politics, I reflected on the first days of the life of a tiny person, wondering what kind of world he will know as an adult. 

 

Kids these days . . . 

Old fogies like me have been saying that for centuries, but I still like to make comparisons between generations in my family. My grandfather pointed out that local transportation when he was young involved horses, and he was about the age I am now when humans walked on the moon. When my father was growing up, a truck drove around his urban neighborhood delivering ice for iceboxes. My generation was the first to establish households that required refrigerators, air conditioners, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, and, heaven-help-us, computers at the outset.

Our thirty-something children are of the first generation to have had cell phones while attending school. CDs were the standard format for recorded music, color television was ubiquitous, and the Internet was barely a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye, used only by scientists and academics.

When I was a kid, Popular Mechanics magazine predicted that by now, we’d be whisking about in personal jet-powered vehicles. It didn’t bother me that the cartoon renderings made them look like trash cans—I’d be happy to stand on banana peels and coffee grounds if my PJV would speed me through the Lincoln Tunnel two feet above the stalled traffic. I’m a little disappointed that this hasn’t happened yet. I think they spent too much time developing the fax machine.

When I wonder what the future holds for four-day-old Sam, it’s safe to say the technological products that will be important to him when he’s a young adult have yet to be imagined. But since I’m far from the field of technological development, I’ll leave that speculation to the engineers.

A couple years ago, Wendy and I were visiting our daughter’s in-laws in Athens, when Christos, an architect, took us to visit an ancient amphitheater outside the city. He told us that the large architectural firm for which he had worked held employee conferences at the site so they could study the particulars of the design and construction, and he pointed out some incredible facts. I was especially impressed by the fact that the 10,000-seat structure occupied a section of a perfect sphere, and after thousands of years was still perfectly level. Christos explained that the techniques used for the design, surveying, and construction must have been written down, but that all documentation had been lost through the ages. He recalled his boss lowering his voice and posing the rhetorical question, “Who was the bastard who burned the Library at Alexandria?”

 

The death of culture

Just as hundreds of generations of accumulated recorded knowledge was lost forever in the (multi-stage) destruction of that venerable library, our modern society seems capable of losing important components, ironically at the hands of the very advance of technology. As life becomes more complicated and methods of information management and communication proliferate, our collective attention spans are diminishing. National Public Radio is still able to retain an audience willing to listen to news stories that last several minutes, but most of our news is delivered to us in brief bursts. It’s easy to get the sense that some of the things that are central to our culture are being threatened by our collective ability to pay attention, to concentrate, and to participate in activities that require the thoughtful use of time.

One example of this is as simple as the written word. A friend who had neurosurgery on her right arm fell and broke her left arm while traveling in Italy. Her right hand is still tingly as her nerves heal, and her left arm is in a heavy rigid plaster cast. She reports the delight in taking advantage of the Dictation and Speech functions of her MacBook. Having lost comfortable use of both hands at least temporarily, she is able to continue her work as an attorney, dictating letters, e-mails, and formal documents into her machine. And I confess to frequent use of voice memos with my iPhone. But when I recently heard a story on NPR about how some educators are starting to wonder whether it’s necessary to teach cursive writing in public schools, I shudder while acknowledging my culpability.

Will Sam go to school in an age when copperplate script is obsolete? What would that mean to our society? Do we care? Or would that be a lamentable loss?

§

Most readers of The Diapason can read music. With a glance at a score, we can accurately hear melody, harmony, and rhythm in our “minds’ ears.” We’re multilingual. We might take it for granted, but we learned every jot-and-tittle purposefully. When and where did we learn this? I’ll speak for myself—you can fill in your own story. I had my first piano lessons when I was about eight, and I know Miss Swist laid the foundation for my musical literacy. I also remember the goitered and aptly named Mrs. Louden who crowed in front of elementary school classrooms, teaching us simple songs and writing quarter notes and rests on the blackboard using a cool chalk gang-holder to draw staves.

Of course, I’ll encourage Chris and Alex to give Ben and Sam music lessons—I’ll offer to pay for them. But I doubt they’ll experience anything like the even questionable musicianship provided by Miss Louden in Winchester, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. When I was leading a church youth choir, most of the kids had no background reading music, so I gave it to them. I know that many of my colleagues do exactly that as part of their work with children. But that covers only those kids going to church. If the schools aren’t teaching basic musical skills, a huge swath of children would never be exposed to quarter notes. Do we care about that? 

Plato said, “I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the key to learning.” Imagine a Presidential Education Commission that promoted the teaching of music as a basic tenet of public education. What a world that would be!

In 1920, the population of the United States was about 106,000,000, and 300,000 new pianos were sold. That’s one new piano for every 353 Americans. Today there are about 319,000,000 Americans, and according to an article published in the New York Times, in 2006, Americans bought only about 76,000 pianos.1 That’s one new piano for every 4,197 Americans. That huge decline must have been caused largely by the introduction of radio, television, and electronic recordings. But I can’t escape the notion that a hundred years ago, most households owned pianos and included family members who could play them.

Chris and his older brother Mike grew up singing in choirs that I directed, they both had piano lessons, and they were both often conscripted as “tuner’s helper,” but when they were out on their own, they made their own choices about church. I doubt that Sam or Ben will follow their grandfather’s footsteps into church music, but I hope they’ll both go through life with an understanding of the art of music, enough to allow them to be free to be moved by it.

§

Throughout the centuries, artists have manipulated materials as various as marble and linseed oil to record their observations and interpretations of the world around them. And they took it seriously. Michelangelo’s stunning statue, David, is almost 17 feet tall and weighs almost 12,500 pounds. Do we assume that the original block of marble was twice that heavy (25,000 pounds), 2½ times (31,250 pounds) as heavy, or more? It was removed from a quarry in Carrara, Italy, and the finished statue is in Florence, over 80 miles away. No big deal; a heavy crane lifts it onto a truck, and off we go on an asphalt highway. No, Michelangelo completed the statue in 1503—that 13-ton stone was hauled over hill and dale using carts with wood wheels drawn by oxen over roads of mud and stone.

When I was in college, I took several art history courses, learning rudiments of style, iconography, and techniques—knowledge that enhances every visit to an art museum forty years later. I’ve watched droves of tourists stream from their buses along well-worn pathways toward an iconic masterpiece like Mona Lisa, ignoring hundreds of compelling artworks, actually missing the entire experience while snapping bootleg photos, as I sneaked off in the other direction to have sumptuous galleries to myself.

Walking through a doorway from one gallery to another, I’ve burst into tears encountering an iconic painting. I would have been introduced to the image by a slide in a Carousel machine in a darkened lecture hall forty years ago, but seeing the real thing is visceral. The Starry Night on a tee-shirt doesn’t raise the hairs on your neck, but the very piece of canvas and streaks of paint that were handled by Vincent Van Gogh sure do.

Sam and Ben live more than 200 miles from us. I’m looking forward to having them here for Grandpa visits when I can take them to New York’s wonderful museums. Meanwhile, I know that Chris and Alex will take them to the great museums of Boston. I hope that forty-something Sam will take his children to art museums.

§

The three major broadcast networks and two UHF channels that were around when I was growing up have become hundreds of cable channels broadcasting everything from real art to pure bunk. Originally hailed as the greatest educational tool of the twentieth century, television has deteriorated into a wasteland of misnamed experiences. You might tune in to Animal Planet, expecting something like the carefully researched nature programs of public television, but find a blood-and-guts story about feeding habits, narrated in an emergency voice, as if normal feeding habits should be reported like war zones. (Oh no! Look what that alligator did to that egret!) The History Channel shares idiotic testosterone-induced antics that have nothing to do with history, and while The Weather Channel could teach us some fascinating science, you’re more likely to see poorly equipped, poorly educated “researchers” racing across Texas and Oklahoma, intending not to be hit by a tornado and acting surprised when they are.

Hollywood provides an endless supply of violent, gory fantasies, and full-length movies are instantly available to us, streaming through our laptops and phones, but what about live theater? When I was in high school, dozens of friends were gathered by the music department to learn, produce, and perform Broadway musicals. I’ll never forget the lyrics to the songs of Oklahoma! or Little Mary Sunshine, having pounded out the tunes on the piano hundreds of times, and watching my friends spread their thespian wings was a delight.

Those productions were more energetic and enthusiastic than artistic, and our Curly was no Alfred Drake (original Broadway cast, 1943), but that troupe of school chums sure got a taste of what’s involved in live theater. We dealt with stage fright, casting jealousy, embarrassing stage kisses, memory lapses, and missed cues, but that was really a life experience, giving us an appreciation of the emotion of acting. Two people on a stage can make an audience gasp, cringe, laugh, or cry. You see spittle flying between faces and realize the extent to which the actors have abandoned themselves in service of the story. I hope that Sam will appreciate and seek out live theater.

§

Wendy is a literary agent, working to enable authors selling their manuscripts to publishers and laboring to promote and advocate the books as they arrive on the shelves in bookstores. In many ways, her work parallels mine. Books and pipe organs are facing competition from electronic alternatives; both are viewed by many as outdated, even unnecessary. But just like a pipe organ, there’s no substitute for a real book. You feel its weight in your lap, you handle the pages, you can even write in it, leaving notes for yourself or for the next person to read. 

I’m proud that my kids grew up loving books, and that they love books as adults. Chris and Alex’s condo is alive with books—hundreds of books. We bring more each time we come, and we know that friends and family join us. Ben loves to sit in a lap to “read” a familiar book. He knows many of them by heart and recites along as you read, imitating inflections and correcting errors.

I trust that Sam will become an adult in a world that reveres the printed page, in which information is disseminated and discussed on paper and in which stories are told on paper. I trust that he will pass on that love to his friends and the family members that follow him. And I’ll be giving him books at every opportunity.

§

Books, music, theater, and art are all still in the mainstream of our culture. People who seek and appreciate them enjoy the wealth of knowledge and depth of expression of those who have preceded us. And through their exposure to the heights of human culture, they are open to the appreciation of less prevalent expressions. As participation in the American church has diminished, fewer members of society are likely to be familiar with pipe organs, or even have experienced them at all.

I imagine that Sam will be more familiar with the pipe organ than other kids in his classes—I’m looking forward to sharing my passion with him as part of his awareness of his family. And who knows, maybe he’ll take some lessons. 

I fully expect Sam to be familiar with video games—his father and uncle are products of the generation that started with PacMan and Mario Brothers and has since gone deeper into that world that I don’t understand. As our kids were the ones who understood how to program a VCR, my grandsons will be virtuosic in operating gadgets we haven’t dreamed of.

But I hope, and I’ll do all I can to guarantee, that his education will not only expose him to the wide world of culture, but also immerse him in it. He’ll be well versed in the latest games, movies, music, and art. And he’ll be familiar with Shakespeare and Shostakovich, Donatello and Don Giovanni, Brunelleschi and Stravinsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Bernstein and Sondheim. He’ll know the difference between Bach and Offenbach, and he’ll pass it all on with love and passion. I’m not pretending that he’s going to be an artist, an actor, or a musician, but intending that he’ll know enough about those things to care about them. I expect it of him, and I expect it of me. Lucky for all of us.

 

Notes

1. Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Laid-Back Labor” (Freakonomics blog), The New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2007.

 

Related Content

March 18, 2024
The celebration “These people will be your friends for life,” Karel Paukert pronounced to his organ class at Northwestern University in the mid-1970s…
March 18, 2024
That ingenious business Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820), whose oppressive rule over the American colonies led to the American…
March 18, 2024
Robert Eugene Leftwich Robert Eugene Leftwich died January 13, 2024. He was born July 2, 1940, in Texas and grew up in Longmont, Colorado. He…