For the past number of months, I've converted from listening to the Easy Listening radio station to the Jazz one. Must say, it's been a pleasant change. I'm a sucker for those old love songs, and I love the way different artists play with the notes. I'm good with the music where I can follow the melody, but I must admit to and apologize for not understanding atonal music at all. To me, it all sounds like a traffic jam. When instrumentals go far off the basic melody line, I get lost and a bit frustrated. Luckily, the bulk of the music played on the station is more or less at my level for music appreciation, and many of the artists played are local, which is really neat.
Both Jazz and the Blues hit me in a few spots. For one, the old 'standards' are beautifully written, and frankly, in contrast to Rock, I can follow the lyrics. For another, the music takes me back to my childhood piano that sat in our living room, where my dad used to play and sing the evening away to the very songs I'm listening to today. It's familiar and sentimental, let alone stunning to listen to.
One of the days when #3 was home for Reading Week, we were in the car together, driving to visit my mother who lives about an hour away. We were listening to the jazz station (he loves the music as well) when an atonal piece was being played. Neither of us had the patience to listen, so he decided to flip to the Classic Rock station. The music was fabulous, perfect for a long drive; Queen, the Stones, even Little Stevie Wonder. But along with the 'classic' stuff, there was also new music played. But here's the strange thing about the new music--a lot of it was simply music from the '70's and '80's revisited. So, between listening to the remaking of Jazz standards on one station as well as listening to the reworking of classics in Rock, I started to wonder if there was anything new under the sun.
In Education, teachers who have been around as long as I have know that ideas are cyclical. We go to Professional Development days and hear about new methods of teaching children effectively. These experts have programmes with slick names and glossy brochures. The old timers like me listen to the presentations and then turn to each other and ask, Isn't this the exact same thing as...? And it is.
When I was a little girl in elementary school, we had Reading Groups. They had cute little names like the Duckies, the Kitties and the Puppies. The teacher would call up each group separately in a round robin fashion. The Duckies would read while the Kitties and Puppies did their work. When the Duckies finished, they would do work and the next group would come up and so forth. Each group had a different reader, or minimally, were working on different stories. Of course, even though every group had seemingly innocuous names, we kids all instinctively knew that the groups were levelled. We could tell by who was in each group. We knew the academic pecking order, even in Grade One. We simply played into the teacher's little fantasy of thinking she was pulling one over on all of us. We didn't want to make her feel bad.
Today, that little trick has a fancy name. It's called differentiation. It works exactly the same as it did 45 or 50 years ago. Okay, maybe all those years ago, it was only done in Reading, and today we do it in every subject, but the concept is the same. The assignment is geared to the child's level of capability. Old concept, different name. Nothing new under the sun.
Okay, yes, you're right. There are plenty of new things in this world. The computer on which I'm writing this drivel, for one. But when all is said and done, most new things are there to enable one to do the old things in a slightly different way. The old is still there, and it's not too bad.
Our world is moving very quickly. Life is stressful. We need some familiarity to remind us that although the world is changing, it's not changing as much and as quickly as we think. So what do we do? We dust off old standards and sing or play them differently, but not so different so as not to recognize them. We take the Rock music we were raised with and hip hop it a bit. We retool ideas that we once shelved, clean them up and call them new. For the young'n's, the music, the standards, the ideas...they ARE new. For the oldtimers, they are reminders that we have never been off the mark.
Old, reliable. New and improved. They are one and the same.
And I find that reassuring!
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