Klarinet Archive - Posting 001352.txt from 1997/08

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: RE: you call that music?
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 1997 15:40:42 -0400

> From: MX%"klarinet@-----.22
> Subj: you call that music?

> Ed Lacy wrote, regarding Pete Fountain, Lawrence Welk, and other
> performers:
>
> "we didn't have the benefit of 20/20
> hindsight as we tried to understand the relationships between the
> various types of music and its aesthetics and sociology."
>
> Lawrence Welk made MUSIC? I guess most of us have become more broad in
> our interpretations over the years. But as for myself, even today, try
> as I will to watch the reruns, I still cringe, hold by breath, and let
> out a scream as I frantically run for the remote after only a few
> seconds of that torture.

If someone offered you the extraordinary amounts of money Welk
made by doing his thing, I suspect that, like most of us, your
ethics would bend to the situation, no offense intended.

I hate polkas. I always felt that one had to be subhuman to play
polkas. But when I needed money & a polka gig was available with
The Harmony Bells, or Frank Wocznerowsky, or Johnny Sopczik I was
glad to get the work. (Frankly, I felt that any language that
could combine c and z in such a fashion could not be culturally
sound!) And I always felt so out of place playing polkas
and obereks at Saturday night Polish dances in the White Eagle
Halls of New England. For one thing, if you smiled at one of
the pretty girls, her four brothers, father, and six uncles
made hostile remarks to you and went for their guns. At Polish
weddings, they never fed us, just gave us a bottle of whiskey and
told us never to stop playing, "or else we will put an entire
kishka up your kishka."

It is very easy to point at music that you do not find culturally
acceptable and say, "ech" but someone must like it or else it
would not be around. My mother used to love Liberace and she
often expressed to me how she felt he "was the finest musician
who ever lived." I punched her in the mouth a couple of times for
that remark but it didn't do any good. That's what she liked.
And for me to take a counter position based on rationality, was
a waste of spit.

Chaque un a son gout! said the old lady as she kissed the cow.

>
> Bill E. (whose grandparents always turned it on - as background "music"
> for their conversations)
=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================