On Music

My wife and I are amateur musicians. I play the piano and sing a little and my wife plays the guitar and piano. We'd like our children to play instruments, too, but we don't want to push them. They both seem interested in music but don't have any interest in practicing so we're mostly just playing around with music for now.

We are thinking of getting our 10-year old an electronic keyboard of his own (we have pianos, guitars and other electronic keyboards around). I saw a nice keyboard with tons of sounds, a MIDI connection (through a USB port), a microphone input (he especially enjoys singing) and many other nice features. All this for only $88. It's just amazing. When I first got into electronic music in the 80's (I'd been playing the piano since the late 50's), it cost hundreds of dollars to get a cheap, not very good synthesizer. To get a sampler that sounded something like a piano was well over a thousand dollars. And the keyboards were cheap and many were not touch sensitive. The first good 88-key keyboard I got that felt like a piano cost about $1300 (in the early 90's) - and it had no sounds! It was just a controller and you needed to buy sound modules for it. The best programs for computers were on the Macintosh (relatively expensive in those days) and the programs were hundreds of dollars.

Now things are so inexpensive, you'd think school music programs would be flourishing but most public schools are cutting back their music programs. After all, how do you have a standardized test for music? I don't see many schools cutting back on their football and basketball teams but they are cutting out art, drama and music. I was watching a college football game the other day (for some reason, I couldn't find the local science fair on TV :-) and the coach was being interviewed after his team had just won in the last few seconds of the game. He said, "This is why these kids came here to school!" I thought they went for an education. Of course, I know how it works. It's just a shame.