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The Price Of Ignorance. As a professional musician, I must confess that I'm a bit of a lout when it comes to really understanding both music and acoustics. Making a living, for me, has always come before knowing how things work, but now that I've been forced into early retirement and have nothing but time on my hands, guilt over not having really learned my trade, and a burning curiosity over the details of what I should have learned many years ago, have started me on a journey that is calling into question literally everything I thought I knew. Actually, I know all of this stuff already. It's all up there in my old bean, somewhere. It got put there a long time ago, in order that I be able to write the exams. But what got past me then was the underlying implications of what I'd learned, and where those implications would one day lead. Well, that "one day" is now. Here's what I mean, when I say that it's all really hitting me where I live in a big way right now: Let's use life on the old homestead as a parallel: My paternal grandfather was born on a homestead near Lyons, Colorado, in 1892. He learned how to make butter, cheese, leather belts, shoes, saddles, tack . . . he was a damned good blacksmith, and as such knew about smelting ore . . . the list of what he and other people of his day knew is a long one. Today, people live in cities, have no survival skills, and haven't a clue as to where things really come from or how to make them. What has this got to do with music? Well, if you go back to the 7th century, to the days of plain song, otherwise known as Gregorian chant, you'll discover that music in those days was like flying an early aeroplane, with no radio and no instruments to tell you anything. By comparison, you know where you are pitch-wise today because you always have a reference, like a musical instrument, and it's easy to tune today's instruments. Most of them require little or no fiddling. Instruments that require no fiddling are the electric or electronic piano and organ, synthesisers and samplers, and so on. Want to tune a stringed instrument like the guitar? Hey, just plug into a tuner! And other acoustic instruments? Well, they make tuners compatible for all of them these days.
Approximate Word count = 1619
Approximate Pages = 6.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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