Thomas W. Bethel wrote on Mon, 04 October 2010 07:00 |
Well said as usual...I was talking to a 30 year old friend who just got her Masters degree in art. Her father is a emeritus professor of audio and music technology and her mother is a retired high school music teacher.
We started talking about the current students in college.
She said that it was amazing to her that the current college students did not seem to want to take time to learn the fundamentals of what they were in college supposedly learning to do but instead wanted to jump right into the creative phase. Her specialty is metal jewelry art and there is a lot to learn about metallurgy and materials technology before a person can start making jewelry but the students she was helping learn had virtually no interest in learning any of that and wanted to immediately start creating the jewelry before they had learned any of the fundamentals of the craft that make it work.
I have noticed the same thing about a lot of college students who are studying to become audio engineers. They want to start "creating" before they know any of the technology or the whys and wherefores of the ways things work. They are, in many cases, putting the cart before the horse. They seem to be driven to "create" and not to worry about the technology behind their creations.
Two of my students are enrolled in the college in audio technology courses. They seem to be more concerned with producing something meaningful than in learning the technology behind the equipment that they are using.
When you take the time to show them the technology and why things work the way they do they feign interest but you can sense that they really don't care.
It seems to be all about the creative process and not about technology.
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For your thirty-year-old friend to have said such a thing is quite refreshing!
Having graduated from a fine arts college, and a recording college, I must reluctantly confirm the general lack of interest for history and repertoire present in academia. Unfortunately for the unengaged student, this lack of knowledge is often what defines his/her work. Not in every case, but often enough.
Does anyone know if it's always been this way, or did the digital revolution changed things, or something else?
Agreed that the market is changing shape more than it's disappearing. But, things have always been changing. The recording industry changed music from a service based business to (largely) a product based business during the 20th century. So, things are just shifting somewhere else now. . .
Those who blazed their own trail are far more valuable to history anyway. And, historically thinking, expecting to make a living right out of the gate isn't realistic.
Choreographer Paul Taylor spent almost twenty years squatting in his studio, living off a hot-plate (he graduated from Juilliard). B