Dawn RitchWHEN I was a child, I could read a musical score and play two instruments, the piano and the guitar. In my early teens, I was arranging, composing, writing lyrics, and giving amateur performances.
By amateur, I mean only that I refused to collect a fee which would have instantly meant losing my amateur status. I would tune my guitar, which I still have, just for fun.
In my early 20s, I decided I would rather have finger nails. It was as simple as that. No one who plays the guitar can have finger nails. It is impossible to hold the notes on the fret, much less any combination of them, with finger nails. So, as easily as that, I gave up the guitar which by then, was my only instrument, and burnt my compositions.
UNBEARABLE
This makes me, on the subject of music, as unbearable as any reformed smoker, always telling others to play music and learn music. And this, while my guitar has lain in its case unopened for the past thirty-odd years. The other day, I was shocked to see I still had it. I shook it, and heard it shift. It was still there.
Dead white men have held rapturous control of the culture of the world for centuries. To play today as a virtuoso, or conduct any of their works, even to sing, is an event for worldwide rejoicing. Not a note can be learnt, not a bar, without study and religious practice at least three times a week. Facial expressions don't count. Only sound, harmonious sound.
Here in Jamaica, facial expression is all that seems to count. Performers hold their instruments only for ornamentation. Even the organists hiring themselves out to the church can't bother to practise anymore. They prefer to hold random notes at mournful length because nobody in the congregation is expected to notice. It's a travesty of sound.
STUDENTS INTERESTED
I noted with happiness, therefore, that the School of Music at the Edna Manley College of the Performing Arts in St. Andrew now there's a mouthful reported last week renewed interest among students to play instruments. And that they've been trying 'to send more students into the schools, especially in the rural areas, to try and influence what's going on there'.
Well, when last I heard, the 'music teachers' who'd been sent out didn't know and couldn't teach music. And the rural schools themselves were crying out for instruments because social gatherings wanted them. But then, no one would describe me as politically correct.
Even communist China has abandoned political correctness in popular culture. The BBC Music Magazine published in December 2005 reported that ... at this moment, there are some 40 million Chinese children learning the piano which is why the Pearl River piano company, (not yet a Western household name, but give it time) is currently the second-largest piano manufacturer in existence. (The company) is poised to become the largest producer of pianos anywhere in the world. That Steinway has struck any agreement with the company to build their new Essex models shows that they're not just about quantity.
And all this, despite the fact that because of Mao Tse Tung a generation was lost to music. His red army destroyed pianos, violins, tortured and put to death the owners. Deng Xiaoping, who took power in China in 1976, had an ear for Western Music. When he died in 1997, the publication notes, the event was marked officially by a performance of the Mozart Requiem.
The publication also states: "There are now 30 full-time, full-sized, professional symphony orchestras in China, more than in the U.S. Opportunity and change seem to be all that anybody talks about today in China."
A well-dressed young woman called Ming Li, who had travelled far from her origins as a child of factory workers in a distant province (and now programming director at the Beijing Music Festival) is quoted as saying: "My parents can't figure out my life the fact that I have a car, an apartment, and travel the world doing this job. But then, they can't understand my job either. They don't know what classical music is."
BBC Music Magazine also states that "by 2020, the size of the artistically-aware Chinese middle-class is likely to account for 40 per cent of the population, by then 1.4 billion . ... by that year, China will have overtaken Japan, and certainly the U.S, as the world's largest consumer of luxury goods, including CDs and audio equipment."
STAKING OUT THE TERRITORY
The Chinese apparently don't mind playing dead white men's music. So European and American agents and record company executives comb their music festivals staking out the territory. Not a bad economic prospect for trained and talented Chinese classical musicians.
The most popular department at the Jamaica School of Music we're told is Jazz and Pop. This attracts, they say, "students eyeing a career in commercial music." This must be code I think, for the usual voice and drum. By comparison to classical music, this has little commercial potential except for a very tiny few. Students should not be misled into believing otherwise. Unless of course there are no teachers to teach instruments, and not much in the way of instruments either.
Like our nurses, our classical musicians are forced to emigrate in order to earn a proper living. And the Jamaica Military Band here has fallen off, and will soon disintegrate.
I hope, therefore, that our new Prime Minister, who I know also has an ear for classical music, will preside over a re-flowering of it here in this country, as it is in China. It brings opportunity, change and luxury. Nobody need disagree with that, nor feel compelled to call it something other than classical music. Like cigarettes, things just seem to fall into place when it's around.
Be gentle on the musicians and the cigarette smokers, because we bring peace to all users, and can be enjoyed under any tree.
FOOTNOTE: As a committed smoker, I'm glad there are no new taxes on cigarettes. What we pay for them feels like monthly rent. And that is a shamelessly high enough tax on nicotine as it is.
I don't know whom to thank for this reprieve, and am certain it can't be the Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies, who even now must be seeking to apply it by stealth. Probably through the National Health Fund which he'll amalgamate with National Housing Trust and everything else if he has the slightest opportunity, and then increase the amalgamated tax borne disproportionately by us liquor drinkers and cigarette smokers.
Madam Prime Minister does neither, but I hope for future mercy for us lowly creatures who rejoice in both. A reduction in taxation, and a reduction in public waste.
