GOODSOUND!GoodSound! "Editorial" Archives

April 1, 2005

 

Watching TV with Galileo

Besides the Teen Titans on Saturday morning and the occasional episode of Zoom, my five-year-old son, Galileo, doesn’t watch TV. This relative lack of television viewing has left him ready to watch anything I’m willing to let him watch, so I had a captive audience when I got the first of a nine-disc set of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic’s Concerts for Young People from Netflix. This wasn’t the first time Galileo and I have enjoyed Bernstein & Co.: we’ve had the three-LP set of a children’s introduction to the orchestra since he was born (my wife has owned the set since childhood; like her, it’s still in great shape), and last year Galileo was often in the room while I listened to Leonard Bernstein: An American Life, an NPR documentary series about Bernstein. (The documentary, which I found highly enjoyable, is available as an 11-CD set from www.zbs.org.) When I suggested we watch one of these concerts, my son told me he wanted to watch some of the Fleisher Superman cartoons or some Looney Tunes that we recently got on DVD, so we struck a deal: one children’s concert, then some cartoons.

The first episode of Bernstein’s Concerts for Young People, "What Music Means," originally aired on CBS in 1958. The first thing you’ll notice is that television production has come a long way. The show is black and white, of course, the print is pretty cruddy and soft, and, in order to get more of the orchestra in the picture, they used a fisheye lens that creates a distractingly odd-looking image. All of the children are in jackets and ties or dresses, and the television director has no compunction about showing some children falling asleep during the show. The sound and video are mediocre.

But the show is fantastic. Bernstein’s message throughout his lecture and performance is that, literally, music does not mean anything other than the sounds that it is composed of and the related emotional reactions we have. The least important part of the music’s meaning is any story that the composer or listener might overlay on the sound. Music can be used to tell stories, or can be given specific titles to invoke places or things, but the music as music does not necessarily relate to those places or things. Each of our individual responses to a piece of music is as good as anyone else’s. This is a sophisticated message for young children, but, using an example that involves Superman, Bernstein makes his points clearly and persuasively.

We watched this hour-long show intently for about 30 minutes, after which Galileo went upstairs. I thought the show might have bored him, but in fact he’d left only to return to our home theater with two tambourines, a recorder, an accordion, and a triangle so that we could play along with the orchestra. I’m sure Richard Strauss never wrote an accordion part for Don Quixote, but Galileo’s improvisation sure sounded good. So good, in fact, that we forgot about the cartoons altogether and just kept playing music. We even watched the second concert on the disc, which features American music. Geek that I am, I was excited when, near the end of the concert, Bernstein announces a special guest, Aaron Copland, who concludes the show by conducting some of his own music.

As Galileo and I accompanied the New York Philharmonic on recorder and accordion, I began to think that, no matter how informative and captivating Bernstein’s shows are, they would never again have a large audience. My son’s friends expect their TV shows to have color, fast movement, and marketing ties to inexplicable card games. They’d never sit still for a black-and-white concert and lecture -- I’m not even sure some of their parents could sit still for these shows. I’d love to see a new series of children’s concerts broadcast on over-the-air television with a conductor and orchestra who would revisit these same themes and introduce young kids to music.

I’m sure that many orchestras around the country host children’s concerts, but that isn’t the same as the wide audience they could get on television. A quick check of local orchestras showed that Wynton Marsalis will host a children’s concert with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra soon, but the tickets are $30 each. So, while the children of music lovers or the well-heeled will enjoy the show, most kids in need of exposure to music will not be helped.

Television is, I think, the only way to bring "serious" music -- by which I mean not American Idol and its offspring -- to a mass audience. Leonard Bernstein was no ordinary conductor; any successful new series would need to find another charismatic figure who could really speak to children. If done right, it could be just as successful as Idol and its imitators, but I doubt that even PBS would nowadays undertake such a series.

This week my son was home sick, and I found myself watching Zoom with him. We don’t watch it regularly, but in this episode they used LPs in a science experiment involving static electricity. One of the Zoom kids said something like, "These are records. If you’ve never seen one, ask your parents about them. They might remember them from before CDs. You probably have some in your basement or you can find them at yard sales." This Zoom project didn’t destroy the records the way other craft projects do (such as making a bowl by softening a record in the oven), but it illustrated how LPs continue to get little respect and are treated as an obsolete technology. This month we review an entry-level turntable package from Thorens that could ensure that your kids won’t have to wonder what records are for. One thing the kids on Zoom had right is that records are cheap; anyone without a turntable is missing out on a great deal of inexpensive music that can sound as good as, and often better than, those newfangled CDs . . . or SACDs . . . or DVDs.

…Eric D. Hetherington


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