Klarinet Archive - Posting 000740.txt from 1995/10

From: B HUDSON <XDPW41A@-----.COM>
Subj: Re: Bad movies about music
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 00:01:26 -0400

Dan and others objecting to the Benny Goodman story,

I'm not a musician, in fact my involvement with the clarinet started about
a year and a half ago now at the age of 51. However, I'm married to a
professional cellist and I accompanied my now 14 year old son to every
piano lesson and for the first four years of his lessons, and I don't think
I missed being present at more than 10 percent of his practices (which I
was able to somehow charm and cajole him into extending one and one half
hour sessions as a eight and nine year old without his realizing how long
he was working-- he's currently preparing Pictures at an Exhibition as a 14
year old).

The point is that although many of my avenues to music have been vicarious
very little is more important to my life. Now the punch line to all this
is that I was in the 5th grade when the Benny Goodman story came out, and
my imagination was so swept away that I can still recall in vivid detail
the lobby of the theater in which I saw it, the paybill posted outside and
the recording I bought in the lobby with Sing, Sing, Sing on it (which I
still have). And as you may recall from the dominate mentality of
adolescence, talent is taken to be still born without labor at that point
in one's life. Probably more than anything else about the film, the
notion of how hard one has to focus, how notions of perfection have to
totally obsess before anything like perfection can be achieved stuck in my
mind from that picture and probably remained the only guide post to that
understanding until I got into college. Not that I'm arguing that it's a
great film. It's just that it's interesting to me how unpredictable how an
experience will effect different people given age, experience and
sophistication going into the experience. Anytime I think of my
involvement in music that film is always is something of the inauguration
of my music experience.

Bruce Hudson, XDPW41A@-----.com

Raleigh, NC

   
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