I'VE JUST FINISHED WATCHING AN EPISODE OF "TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL" - AN OLD TV SERIES THAT RAN FOR 9 YEARS. I HAVE THEM ALL AS THEY HAVE BEEN PUT TO DVD.
THIS EPISODE WAS ABOUT YOUNG TEENS WITH TROUBLED LIVES, SOME WERE SENT TO A CARE FACILITY FOR THE HANDICAPPED CHILDREN; IN PART TO SEE THAT THEIR TROUBLES WERE NOT LARGE [SO COULD BE OVERCOME] COMPARED TO WHAT SOME CHILDREN HAD TO COPE WITH IN LIFE.
IT REMINDED ME OF YEARS AGO, WELL DECADES AGO.
As a young man in my early 20s I was blessed to learn the "Orthopedic Shoemaking" trade and skill. I was blessed to learn the trade of making hand-made shoes for those with various foot problems, at a facility called "The Council for Crippled Children and Adults" - they also had a sheltered workshop for the disabled, and a day care center for the severely mentally and physically disabled.
Once a week I used to take my guitar in and at noon and play them songs. Going into the day care room for the very mentally disabled, there was this little girl, for the most part seeing her you would think there was hardly any brian function with her disabled body. I well remember the very first time I went in to play songs on my guitar; her face lit up like a lightbulb, and she would smile and smile, wave her hands around the best she could.
There is something about music that can get through to even the most, what you would think was a dead mind in a physical disabled body.
Music is NOT man invented. Music has laws, and surely evolution could not, why would it, invent the laws that make up music.
There are sets of scales, a pattern of music notes, to give melodic sound. The "diatonic" scale has only 7 notes, it follows each scale exactly, no more, no less notes. Seven notes for Seven days of the week. There is then the "chromatic" scales - 12 notes for each scale, and can use all the sharps and flats that there are. So a possible 12 notes; for, as I say to my students, 12 months of the year. Harmony is putting notes together that.....well harmonize, blend, fit, with one another. And so melodic music is the end result.
There ARE LAWS to music, break them, and what is produced is anything but melodic music.
In 1975 I became a full time guitar/banjo/mandolin teacher for a Music School in Ontario, Canada. They also at that time taught the "piano accordion." I walked in one day to hear this horrible wailing, terrible sounds, coming from a piano according. I looked at the receptionists and said, "What on earth is that horrible sound." She told me it was the sound of "music" as taught by some Toronto University "professor" of "music" who taught there should be no rules or laws for music [he was probably some evolutionist who could not stand the idea that music had laws]. Well throw out the laws of music and you have the most horrible, gruesome, repulsive, vile, foul, obnoxious, atrocious, ghastly, noise that you can imagine hitting your ears. It is anything but pleasant to the soul.
Thankfully the idea of some so-called "professor" of music in the Toronto University never caught on; thankfully it died a quick death, never to be resurrected.
Playing the laws of music on any instrument, is playing the laws the creator God invented for music that is pleasant to the soul. Yes I well remember that poor little most severely mentally and physically disabled girl in that day care center room, so many decades ago; her eyes and mind, with a smile on her face, coming to joyful life, when I played songs for her on my guitar.
Ah what the miracle of music can do, when it follows the laws that were created for it.
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