I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural significance of music in education.
Wynton Marsalis reflects on the necessity of teaching the meanings behind music to the younger generations, suggesting that music plays a crucial role in shaping cultural identity and understanding. He points out that without properly conveying the depth and history of music, we miss an essential part of our cultural heritage that helps define who we are as individuals and communities.
In practice
This quote can be used in an educational seminar to stress the need for a music curriculum that addresses cultural meanings.
Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
The main object of teaching is not to give explanations, but to knock at the doors of the mind.
As a kid I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays and I would walk home at night. For several years I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.
I hope that one day when I'll go back to Pakistan, I will build a university like Harvard.
When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
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