Comics are rather popular among young people and have beenCheck out the article... he made many very good points about why it is important to all of us to try to preserve the musical heritage of the Church...
for many decades. But let’s imagine a world in which people never really went
beyond them. No novels, no poetry, no non-fiction. Just comics. Maybe not even
words. Just pictures.
Who would be surprised when the generation turned out
to be illiterate? Let this situation run for three or four generations, and you
would suddenly wake up to a world in which no one could really read and, more
shockingly, no one could teach people to read either.
At this point, you might expect people to suddenly
realize what they have done. A major part of the foundation of civilization had
been inadvertently smashed. If we could easily do a before/after analysis, we
would be shocked more so than if we live in the midst of
transition.
While it is happening, each generation knows
less than the previous generation and increasingly there are fewer and fewer
people around to even notice that there is a problem. People do not even know
what they do not know, nor even that the problem needs to be
corrected.
This, I fear, is pretty much what has happened in the
area of Catholic music — not entirely, but we have approached that fate and
perhaps might be saved from it with massive efforts today.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Another great Adoremus article by Jeffrey Tucker...
Just read the article in the April 2008 Adoremus Bulletin online... "The Decline and Fall of Catholic Music". In the article, Jeffrey gives a very good analogy about the loss of the musical skills within the Catholic church. Here is a brief excerpt:
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I sat next to a communications professor who teaches at Penn State on the my last flight back to Louisiana, and it was one of the most interesting flights I have ever had. At one point we were talking about various media and I mentioned that I feel as if I am one of the few people in my generation that still writes by hand. This professor then went on to tell me that there is a generation of people growing up who will never be able to read the original Declaration of Independence. He said because they don't know how to read cursive script. This younger generation has spent so much time on computers and with other technology that uses block letters as their font that they were never taught cursive script in school and because they were never taught the out come is that they can't read and won't be able to read a vast amount of 'original' documents without first having someone transcribe it to block lettering.
Sad. Sad. But hey, what a convenient way to keep information from that younger generation.
What an interest piece of information! I had no idea... I home school my two boys and have spent a good deal of time working them on their penmanship (neither of them is naturally neat in their handwriting).
I remember when I was first teaching my eldest cursive and how excited he was to learn it... I told him he would be able to write a lot more quickly once he learned it... it moves along faster than printing...
This also links back to the novel (The Book of Air and Shadows by Gruber -- see review) I read recently and the difficulty the characters in the novel had in reading the script from Shakespeare's time... but I hadn't actually put it together with the current generation and how tied to keyboards they are...
thanks for the post...
j.
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