The Kids Are All Right
But what about the rest of us?
The other night I was on Youtube, trying to find a live video of the song “Rockets and Jets” by Hospitality. I wrote about Hospitality back in January—they’re still my favorite recent discovery (though they haven’t been playing music since 2015 or so—a wise decision, if you ask me!).
I didn’t find much, except for this:
…which is a pretty incredible string arrangement being played by “Pannonia String Quartet”—a bunch of kids. Listen, I know they’re not all nailing the intonation; it’s okay, they’ve gotta be like high school age. Have you ever tried to play a violin?
If you can listen past that—to not just what’s happening, but what they’re going for—the arrangement is incredible. It’s like, one of the best pieces of music I’ve heard lately. (Obviously starting with a good song helps). And while the players are… young… they’re still doing a really good job of playing together and holding down a groove even through quite a lot of tricky-sounding sections.
Unrelated: (but ultimately related) I also went down some other rabbit hole and was reading this book, In Every Town: An All-Ages Music Manualfesto, which is basically a manual, as advertised, that walks you through how to set up DIY concerts (and beyond that, to create spaces for all-ages events). It’s worth checking out and skimming if you have even the slightest interest in being a musician or putting on shows; I think a lot of the advice is still right on, although it does make me a bit depressed that from the time it was published (2010, I think) things have only gotten worse, and harder, for anyone trying to make music happen in the world. On the other hand, I think most of the organizations it uses as examples of successful nonprofits still exist, so that has got to count for something.
But anyway these two things collided in my brain and produced a new complaint about things as they are, and that’s why I’m writing today. Sorry.
In the Manualfesto, there’s a brief mention of how, while youth-focused organizations and programs etc are incredibly important and worthy, there are some inherent issues that you run into, like how being youth-focused winds up excluding everything else. I was lucky when I was younger to get to be in some youth-focused musical programs, and I certainly benefited from that kind of education. But I think the instances where I learned the most were at the fringes of those experiences, when a music teacher briefly treated me as an equal, or just by hanging around some older kids or much older, seasoned musicians in an informal way I was able to absorb some more of the what-it-is of being a musician and talking about music. These moments were moments—they didn’t happen often. It wasn’t frequent that I felt this way. Maybe if I’d been a more outgoing person I would have experienced that sort of thing more often and been a better player as a result. I’m not sure.
Anyway, what I’m driving at here is that some of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences of my life have been multi-generational, multi-sectional, and sort of out-of-bounds: outside the structures that have been built. Would they have occurred without those structures? No, I don’t think so. So maybe it’s enough that they’re there.
But then when you become an adult, a lot of these structures, at least in America, suddenly fall away, and there’s immediate pressure to be a professional right away. If you’re spending your hours working a day job selling shoes instead of being a musician, are you really just a shoe salesman (or whatever it is that you have to do)?
And then suddenly all this youth focus feels a bit weird. I mean, don’t get me wrong: it’s great that I had all that when I was a kid. It’s great that I got to do those things; they changed my life (possibly for the worse, materially, but I’m not complaining about that). But you start to wonder like, what could you do with some of that funding if it were socially acceptable to, say, spend however much money it takes to keep an adult string quartet practicing and playing arrangements of people’s songs? What kinds of things would be possible?
I realize the incentives are not aligned—you take a bunch of parents with money, and you can afford to pay some musicians to teach them. The numbers don’t really work (at all) when the kids grow up.1
But then, let’s go back to, actually, the title of that book: “In Every Town…” That’s a brilliant title, which possibly doesn’t sound exciting enough to make you want to read it, but does successfully reference the fact that here in America, there was a time when literally every town had a band. And not just a band—a big band (i.e. with an orchestra section), which rehearsed and had repertoire. And then some money moved around and now you can barely afford to give bands free drinks, let alone pay them for a performance.
I know I’m just dreaming here, and there are holes in my logic when you actually parse out all the reasons for why there isn’t money for music. But anyway seeing that video did make me imagine for a moment—what if it wasn’t just the most prodigious kids of their age bracket, but a group of professionals, playing this incredible music? If everyone had enough time and money to actually make it good, and then better than good?2
Again again, and I’m probably repeating myself too much, I don’t mean to complain that wahh, no one gives me opportunities anymore because I’m an adult now. What I’m saying is that some kids’ performances like this one, due to the way that they actually have a bit of money and resources and rehearsal time, give us a window into an alternate world where that stuff is still possible for real, not just as a novel one-off performance but as the sort of thing that might make for a great record.
I don’t expect that world will ever become our reality anytime soon. But in imagining it, there’s something there… I don’t know. I get other ideas: maybe it’s possible to get together a volunteer orchestra, if orchestra music is what you want to play. Maybe it’s possible to do things that are hard if you don’t know that they’re impossible.
I’ll leave you with another example that kind of blew my mind.3 It’s a youth choir, with the rhythm section from Tiny Ruins and a full percussion ensemble and string quartet performing Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s “Hunnybee”:
That’s the problem with kids
And we wonder why there have never been The Beatles 2.
Blew my mind because of just how strange the idea is to get a bunch of kids to sing this song from a band that mostly has songs about doing too many drugs and being depressed—which isn’t to diss Ruban Nielson; that’s why he’s great, it’s just not the most kid-appropriate material. And I wasn’t expecting to see the Tiny Ruins folks. I guess NZ has like 3 people in it?