Mums The Word

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Something I said on the Other Place w.r.t. this BBC article:

If you look at the lists of #1 UK albums it's really only from 1964 that youth-targeted music dominates (and even then the Sound of Music OST is a massive seller in 66-67). I'd guess that listening to and socially enjoying popular music has been primarily an all-ages activity for almost all British history, barring maybe 40 years in the late 20th century. Which we happened to grow up in, so we think this trend is odd.

Is this true, or fair, or significant?

Comments

TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i. i'm not sure what constitutes "popular music" prior to the age of widely available recording and/or music broadcast (starts roughly in the 1920s) (i don;t mnean there aren't various candidates, i'm just unsure which is "most like" our current idea)
ii. prior to overlap of popular and recorded, where did you go to engage w.music? gather round the family piano? the pub? the ballroom? the village square? the locales are inflected classwise and the class inflections have difft age implications
iii. the 40-year anomaly is a fact i think but not in the sense of "soon we will return to normal" cz i have no idea what normal is --- we are hugely over-used to being marketed at in respect of age-style taste... clearly it's possible to push back against this fostered semi-passivity but i think it needs conscious effort

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

oops took too long

the album itself is the anomaly -- a 45-minute collection of songs as the ONLY POSSIBLE unit

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

re ii. I guess one of the age implications is that 'the young' wd often have been left out of communal music activities.

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

middle class children yes, working class children no (?) -- at least in the 19th century

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Sheet music wasn't popular among the working classes but illustrated ballads* etc. were, I thought?

*OK yes I know "ballad" did not necessarily mean "sung ballad"

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[spittake.livejournal.com]

Are farmers middle class or working class? My mother has inherited lots of sheet music from the teens.

Were pianos more or less expensive that the new fangled radios and gramaphones?

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

expense: i think it would depend what decade you're comparing in

there were also player pianos and punch-hole music; and uprights in the parlour were (in the urban UK, at one point) an object of working-class aspiration

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[spittake.livejournal.com]

where did you go to engage w.music? gather round the family piano

hello sheet music industry! in thee olden days you didn't buy the single, you bought the the music to play yourself.

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

That's a bit of a class issue, too - you had to have something to make music on (piano) and the education to read sheet music.

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[spittake.livejournal.com]

Was the ability to read music more common 100 years ago than now? It feels like it was, but I don't know.

Re: TRUE BUT ALSO MISLEADING SIMPLIFIED

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

I would guess that it was in the middle/upper classes, at least among girls. Piano plying was one of the basic accomplishments you picked up to help you pick up a husband. Less common in boys/men, I would guess - music wasn't as important as Latin, there.