Dr. Lyle Leffler's Philosofy

Arvind

Description

• cours - matière potentielle : medicine
• cours - matière potentielle : with the flu

1 Dr. Lyle Leffler's Philosophy Introduction No subject excites me more than Health. At a very young age, I was introduced to natural medicine. My father was an herbalist, and much of my youth was spent helping him to gather and process the many plants and herbs he used in his formulas. He truly believed you are what you think, eat, breath, and drink, and that God has provided us with a medicine for every sickness.

• need for organ transplants
• cure for malaria
• people with the promise of greater health
• many patients
• homeopathy
• malaria
• medicine
• health
• people
• age

Sujets

• Medicine
• Leffler
• In?ija
• Canadá
• Health
• Homeopathy
• People
• Promise

Informations

• Publié par: orzi
• Nombre de lectures: 37
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NEVER TOO LATE

JOHN HOLT

Introduction:

How and Why

Most people who play a musical instrument learned as children. I did not. Few adults who have
never played an instrument before take one up, least of all in middle age, and least of all a bowed
string instrument (supposed to be the hardest). I am one who did. Though I came from a largely
nonmusical family and had almost no musical training or experience while growing up, I began to
play the flute at thirty-four, and the cello at forty, which I put aside a couple of years later and then
took up again at fifty. Now, when home, I try to play three or four hours a day, more when I can
make time for it. To become a skillful musician has become perhaps the most important task of
my life.

This book is the story of how it all came about. Friends of mine to whom I have told some of
this story have found it interesting; I write it in the hope that others may, as well. I hope, too, that
my story may encourage or help other people, above all adults, who may have thought they were
too old, to begin to sing or to play a musical instrument. Or, that it may help many adults who are
now amateur musicians to play better and enjoy it more. Perhaps teachers of adults may also find
these words useful. Beyond this, musicians talk a great deal about ways to interest more people in
music; perhaps my own experience, as told here, may suggest some ways to do this.

In a broader Sense, this is a book about exploration and discovery. I have long had two favorite
proverbs: one is Shaw's "Be sure to get what you like, or else you will have to like what you get,"
the other a translation from an old Spanish proverb, "'Take what you want,' says God, 'and pay for
it.' " To find out what one really wants, and what it costs, and how to pay what it costs, is an
important part of everyone's life work. But it is not easy to find out what we like or want, when all
our lives other people have been hard at work trying not just to make us do what they want, but to
make us think that we want to do it. How then do we find out what we want? What sort of clues,
experiences, inner messages, may tell us? What do we do about such messages when we get them?
This is in part a book about such messages.

This is also a book about teaching, above all the teaching of music. Some music teachers have
been enormously helpful to me- one of them, in ways I was not to realize for many years. But for
the most part I am self-taught in music, and this book is also about that self-teaching. Part of the
art of learning any difficult act, like music, is knowing both how to teach yourself and how best to
use the teaching of others, how to grin from the greater experience and skid of other people
without becoming dependent on them. For few people are likely to become good at music, or
anything else, who do not learn how to teach themselves. What we can best learn from good
teachers is how to teach ourselves better. Other learners of music may find here some things to
help them become better self-teachers, and teachers of music may find ways to help their studentsdo this.

In my journey into music I have been much helped by good fortune. As a child I may have been
musically underprivileged (though no more so than most children) but I was in all other ways
privileged. My parents (like their parents) were well-off; we lived in suburbs, not musically very
lively but in all other ways easy and comfortable. I went to a "good" boarding school and college.
As an adult I have been even more fortunate. If by choice I have lived much of my life with very
little money, so that I could do work I believed in, I have also lived without many worries about
money. This was partly because, though not through choice, or at least not my choice, I never
married. Also, like most people who grow up rich, I never really believed that economic disaster
could strike me. I know the dangers of poverty, as I know the dangers of the atomic bomb, but
they have never been real to me in the way they are to people who have been poor, or to the
survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which is not to say, either, that poor people cannot learn to
love music, or even to become musicians, even great musicians. Many have done so, and some are
now doing so. J.B. Priestley once wrote that the working-class people he grew up with in
Yorkshire knew more about music, and made more music, than the much richer working class of
today. But it is certainly easier to explore, enjoy, and make music, as it is to do anything else, if
one is not constantly worrying about money, and can afford such things as concerts, records,
instruments, practice space, and lessons. The lack of these is one of the reasons why, to name just
one example, the Greater Boston Youth Symphony hardly ever has in it any children from Boston.
What we need to do, of course, is to make musical resources more available to people with little
money.

A few years ago I read in the British magazine The Gramophone a short article about the noted
German conductor Eugen lochum. The article said that he had grown up in a town in Germany
with a population of about two thousand, and that in that town there had been a symphony
orchestra of 75 players and a mixed chorus of 150, who played and sang much of the great music.
It may well be that this town was not typical, and that not every little German town had music
malting on this level. Still, if we had only one tenth this much music making here in Boston (or
any town or city), we would have an orchestra in every neighborhood, and many quartets and
chamber groups in every block. What a city, what a country that would be to live in! I would like
to do all I can to bring that city and that country closer.

Another reason I am writing this book is to question the widely held idea that what happens to us
in the first few years of our lives determines everything that will happen later, what we can be,
what we can do. Musical people am particularly prone to talk this way. The great Japanese string
teacher Suzulri, whose work I have long admired, writes in his books that if children do not hear,
almost from birth, good music (by which he means classical music), if they hear, in short, the kind
of popular music that was all I heard as a child, they will grow up tone deaf. Not so. Countless
other teachers say that if we don't learn to play musical instruments as children we will never be
able to learn as adults. Again, not so. Of course it is nice, if we come freely to music, to come to it
young, but if we don't come to it then, we can later, it is never too late. And while there may be
good grounds for saying that some music is "better" than other music--I happen to think that
Beethoven is better than Hummel, Tchaikovsky better than Clazounov, Stravinsky better than
John Cage, and Duke Ellington better than Glenn Miller--these distinctions have nothing to do
with learning to love music. "Bad" music is not the enemy of "good" music. The world of music is
very large, and all one piece; there are a great many roads into it. As long as we have access to all
of it, and the right to explore it freely, making our judgments as we go, each of us can find his orher own way.

Most of all, I want to combat the idea that any disciplined and demanding activity, above all
music, can never grow out of love, joy, and free choice, but must be rooted in forced exposure,
coercion, and threat. Most of what I have read about music education says this one way or another.
The idea is not only mistaken, but dangerous; nothing is more certain to make most people ignore
or even hate great music than trying to ram more and more of it down the throats of more and
more children in compulsory classes and lessons. The idea is wrong in a larger sense; in the long
run, love and joy are more enduring sources of discipline and commitment than any amount of
bribe and threat, and it is only what C. Wright Mills called the "crackpot realism" of our times that
keeps us from seeing, or even being willing to see, that this is so.

Any other reasons I have for writing this book may become clearer as you read it.



1. A Week of Music

Monday

Monday is orchestra night. At about a quarter past six I put my cello and bow in their case, put
music stand, music, glasses, gadget to hold the cello peg, and other miscellaneous stuff into a
small shoulder bag, sling it over one shoulder and the cello case over the other, and walk to the
Charles Street subway station. At Harvard Square I climb the stairs to Massachusetts Avenue,
walk through the Harvard Yard and then another half mile or so to the small public school in
which we play. A few of the other players are already there, and have set up the chairs. I set up my
music stand in front of the back two of the six chairs in the cello section, take out bow, cello,
music, and other stuff, and start to tune up. If I don't get tuned up before the horn and trumpets get
here, I never will, in this small gym, they make such a racket that I can't hear my own cello well
enough to tune accurately.

One at a time, the good cellists come in, and set up to play in