Electric bass #1(WalMart): $100
Electric bass #2(Fender Jaguar): $600
100-W Bass amp: $300
String & electric bass lessons, past 4 years: $2400
Voice lessons: $60 per hour + 600 miles roundtrip
Acoustic bass guitar: $400
Acoustic bass guitar case: $150
That's for just one of the four musically-inclined kids.
Is it wrong to hope that tonight's PBS premier will show that music correlates positively with cognitive development, social skills, and satisfaction with life?
Check out the site, then tune in tonight. Here's a teaser:
The Neanderthals-there's no evidence that they had language. But they must have had a sophisticated form of communication. They were just like humans, they might would have had to have told other people how they're feeling, they would have had to look after their children and nurture them. They had to have made plans for group hunting and general movement. So what sort of communications system did they have? Now I came to the conclusion which must have been based on high degrees of musicality. Because we can see traces of that in our nearest living relatives. This seems to be the only form of communication with that language that would have been complex to allow them to have function as a social group, and yet not gone that extra step to modern language. So I think they communicated by using sets of phrases, almost like musical phrases that would have had semantic meanings, phrases such as something that would translate into "Let us share meat," "We'll go hunting" or "How are you feeling?" but would have been expressed in musical tones, different types of pitches, different types of rhythms. They might have used these also to build a sense of group identity, very much how we use music today, especially for caring for infants, you know just like we do today with our youngest children before they got language, we sing to them and move them rhythmically . I'm sure the Neanderthals would have been doing exactly the same.
And of course: watching my kids grow musically is truly priceless.