music and the ability to enjoy it as a community

[lumin_esc]

Something has been on my mind for a few weeks. I think it all started when I heard, on the radio, a home recording from the late 1940s of a bunch of folks singing some holiday songs. Some singers were hilariously lacking in tune, but they were all laughing and having a grand time. I was skeptical of its authenticity, or at least its historical

Comments

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I think the advent of the radio is what killed singing and playing music. Until the radio became widespread, you had to make your own entertainment. I remember about 8 or 9 years ago reading an article on the whole issue, someone actually did a study on this very subject.

[hypersnazz]

If by 'radio' you mean 'television'.

[banner]

No, I mean Radio. Radio came out to the masses long before Television did. Television is really just radio with moving pictures if you think about what radio was before television was invented. Also, it took television quite a while to supplant radio as the main means of entertainment. Television in the 60's (when I was young) was not watched anywhere near as much as it is today, nor was it as entertaining. Also it was all black and white and the quality was pretty piss poor.

[hakeber]

Even as recent as the 60's pianos, the old upright variety, were still pretty common. And so was group singing at holiday gatherings and some parties. Ok, so my parents were hippies (and my mom also played quitar and dulcimer, as well as piano), so that colors my experience. But I do remember the singing, and not just at my grandparents. I agree, for most of America it was nothing more than the radio that ended this, but it was slower to happen than you'd think, or I wouldn't be remembering the singing from as recent as the sixties and even early seventies. I'm born too late to have gone to the old jazz jams, but those were pretty common back in the fifties, where just a bunch of folk with instruments would meet up at a jazz joint (a bar) and would just play. Also, the earliest "file-sharing" was nothing more than sheet music sales. Everyone did it, it's how knowledge of new popular music was spread about.

[banner]

You know, I think the last time I went to a party were someone was playing the piano and we were all standing around singing was in the late 70's, it was at a friend from college parent's house, and we were all about the same year in college. I do remember that at parties in the 70's and a few in the very early 80's that someone would often pull out a guitar or two and a few people would perform for fun, but you don't see that really anymore.

I think our generation got it from our parents who would still do it on occasion, but that we did it so rarely it never got passed on at all to the next. Sad that.

[hakeber]

I was given the obligatory piano lessons, but they never took. My voice sucked, so that was never anything I went out of my way to do. Yeah, my generation remembers all this, but it never got properly passed on to us, and pretty died with our grandparents.

[aenaminie]

I;ll sing with uyou! I lvoe that shit~!

[karn]

I still sing along to music, and I still play the piano from time to time.

[paka]

I think music got more individualized as the USA became more middle class. My grandparents used to sing with each other all the time, and of course they owned a piano - but I think more portable and mobile technology meant that we became a culture which was about singing in the car and singing along to the stuff on your headphones, by yourself.