Letters, we've got letters

I read two letters in the NYTimes Magazine this past week that I thought were worth sharing:

Michael Pollan’s article reminded me of just how embedded Julia Child is in the American consciousness, even beyond her intended audience. As a voice teacher, I was feverishly trying to push one of my 20-year-old students to attain the right position on a certain vowel. After I demonstrated for the 50th time, she exclaimed, “You sound just like Julia Child!” After that, I simply asked the student for more Julia Child or sometimes less of her, and she knew exactly what I was talking about. I then tried it on several other students, always with excellent results. Out of the kitchen, onto the opera stage.

JULIAN RODESCU
Philadelphia

This cracked me up, because I have used Julia Child as an example more times than I can remember to help students find vowel positions - usually it helps with an "oo" vowel, but it's also helpful for feeling the open throat and forward, easy vowel position you get if you just relax (harder to do than it sounds, especially when someone is telling you, "Relax!").

Michael Pollan’s article was particularly fascinating in describing how we as a people have delegated cooking activities to others, reducing ourselves to the role of observers and suffering the losses. This sadly continues a progression that has been seen in two other areas of American culture — music and sports — with similar effects.

Broadly, we gave up making music to listen to others do it for us. In our more rural heritage, families and groups gathered around and played enthusiastically and with varying levels of talent, but nonetheless played together as active social groups. Now we pay others to play as we sit and listen, or we even play electronic games that reward pretending to play music. We pay financially and emotionally for sports too, where we pay professionals to play as we sit and watch; less and less often we go outside for a catch. We play video versions of sports now (again, pretendingto play) rather than the real activity, where we might benefit from the exercise and fresh air.

How long before we have a cooking video game called Super Mario’s Hell’s Kitchen?

DAVID VAN NOSTRAND
Oldsmar, Fla.

This letter is all the more interesting because of this week's main article, "While My Guitar Gently Beeps." I agree that in general we have become a nation of spectators rather than participants, particularly where music is concerned. It's part of the reason I continue to teach voice lessons - to help people break out of "spectator" mode and feel comfortable singing in front of others.

However, after having played the incredibly addictive Rock Band video game, I have to say that I think it's a positive development in terms of bringing people back to music participation. Yes, I understand that we're only pretending to play the instruments, but it still requires a sense of rhythm and spatial listening to play the game successfully. Additionally, it encourages singing with at least a basic sense of where the melody is headed, and as you move up the levels of difficulty you're required to have better pitch accuracy, rhythm, and dexterity with both lyrics and melody. But the best part in my opinion is that it gets people out of the mode of watching and judging (a la American Idol), and into actually doing something. No, it's not a substitute for taking guitar lessons or joining a choir, but it does bring family and friends together in the enjoyment of music. Plus, it's just a ridiculously fun game.

On a side note, there is a version of Super Mario Hell's Kitchen. It's called Cooking Mama and if you mess up Mama's eyes turn into fireballs. It's pretty awesome.

Want to share your own experience with video games and music, or just want to talk about how fabulous Julia Child was? Head to the comments section!

Read Michael Pollan's article here.
Read Daniel Radosh's article here.