APHC: Saturday, May 9, 1998

C-Major Society
Saturday, May 16, 1998
Listen

Here's a word for you parents who want to give your children a good musical education. (BACH TWO-PART INVENTION UNDER....) You remember how you suffered taking piano lessons and you think it's only right they should suffer too. (BACH CONTINUES) The danger is: your kid may actually enjoy piano and want to go to music school and study seriously (BIG CHOPIN PIANO) and before you know it, your kid is a professional musician....earning hundreds of dollars a year and feeling unappreciated and bitter, a gifted person whose gifts nobody wants, because in fifteen years, there will be only two kinds of music----- there will be music by jerks (LOVE SHOVEL CHORDS, TR & SS SING:

GET AWAY FROM ME, LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU'RE NOT MY PARENTS, THIS ISN'T MY HOME (MUSIC STOP) and there will be music by creeps. (new AGE PIANO) With jerk music, you struggle for years, get a big drug problem, have a huge hit, earn a million bucks in one week, blow it all, find out that you owe the record company two and a half million for promotional costs, and you're all washed up at the age of twenty- four. (LOVE SHOVELS, TR & SS SING:

DON'T WANT A JOB, DON'T WANT TO WORK, WANT TO ROCK N ROLL, CAUSE I'M A JERK! (STOP) Whereas, with creep music, you have a very nice life. (new AGE PIANO) You make a new CD every three months and your CDs sell steadily year after year because they all sound the same and you have a ranch home in Montana and a place in the British West Indies and you feel good, thanks to massage therapy, a macrobiotic diet, and a lot of ginseng and cactus tea and powdered elk antlers. How can you train your child to play New Age music? Stop the lessons early. Before she gets to Chopin. Chopin did things in minor keys. New Age music is diatonic: do re me fa sol la ti do. Long ringing chords. No lyrics, no chromaticism. Think wind chimes. Keep playing that chord. Keep it simple.

If your child is interested in music would you rather she wind up as a jerk---- (LOVE SHOVELS CHORDS, TR & SS SING:

I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, YOU'RE DISGUSTING!) ---- or would you like to see her having a very nice life, (new AGE PIANO) enjoying a healthful lifestyle and a loving committed relationship and earning millions of dollars making music that impacts people in a positive way? Is there a choice?

A message from the C-Major Society......Americans working to promote harmony through the Key of C.
(c) 1998 by Garrison Keillor