“Here, smell these” said my wife, handing me a bouquet of freshly picked Freesias. I inhaled deeply, but experienced no olfactory sensation. Just a couple of weeks earlier I was savoring the Summersweet that graces my front steps, and earlier in the season my daily walk brought me past purple lilacs that had a most seductive impact. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with my overall smelling mechanism, but the Freesias somehow did not engage me. This suggests that such things are more than just a matter of taste or conditioning. Perhaps it’s a brain chemistry thing.
I recall a situation (decades ago) when my day job involved a large room and lots of cubes. The employees had something of a free hand in how things worked, so we decided at one point to allow people to play recorded music in the room. There was a cassette player, and folks would bring in mostly Top 40 compilations. As it turned out, this was in the 1980’s, so the experience was not that nourishing. One day I decided to put in a tape of The Chieftains. I knew that most people in the room were probably not aware of their music, but I was so enamored of it myself that I was sure once they actually heard it, they would share my enthusiasm. I don’t recall that there were any direct complaints, but I could tell that it was a lead balloon, and not a Led Zeppelin , situation.
Clearly a large part of appreciating is cultural familiarity. But perhaps on some level each of us has (or does not have) biological or neurological components that affect our ability to experience certain kinds of music positively. It’s a curious concept which is best debated by scientists, or over a few brews in the local pub, probably with the same conclusions.
Back in the mid 1970’s when I first began playing the piano for contra dances, it was an unwritten rule that the dance would go until midnight. When the Monadnock Folklore Society sponsored its first Saturday night dance series in Nelson, and later in Greenfield, this was not even something that was discussed – of course it would go until midnight. A while later as I began playing further afield I was surprised to find that some dances ended earlier, and of course we would scoff at the softness of those dance communities who did not have the stamina to hold out until the bewitching hour. These days around here it’s rare to see a dance go this late, and even a well-attended high-energy evening scheduled to go until 11:00 or 11:30 tends to fade in the last hour. What has become of us!
Washington, D.C. – Dudley Laufman, a musician and barn dance caller from Canterbury, N.H., has been awarded the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts, the National Heritage Fellowship. The National Endowment for the Arts, which bestows the fellowships, announced this year’s 11 winners today.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of playing the piano for a Square Dance in Arlington, MA. The caller was Woody Lane, from the Portland, OR area. It’s always great to meet folks from far away, and to see what is unique about their styles. Woody presents a cheerful and casual demeanor which allows him to teach incredibly complicated figures with an air of simplicity. I thought of a master post and beam builder, who painstakingly creates well-thought-out joinery behind the scenes for a house or barn which is then flawlessly raised.
