Saturday, March 9, 2013

Hearing First and Haydn

Assigning a work by Haydn to a child before the child is confident of the volatile nature of hearing is indulging in a ritual passing on of irrelevancy:  Just because the teacher never learned to listen is no excuse for assuming that the child does not care about sound.

Every true musician knows the extremely high standard of originality and suspense in any Haydn work.  The only way to tire of his music is by reverting to a kind of glossed-over non-listening associated with the worst child instruction, alas the rule when I was young with little sign of significant change to this day.