Home entertainment

When you can get world-class entertainment at the touch of a button, why would you do it yourself?

Last week we mentioned a social change that happened a bit over a century ago.  Before the advent of recorded sound, any entertainment at home had to be produced by people present there.  Those who could afford it owned a piano or other musical instrument, and at least one member of the household knew how to play it.  Almost everyone could sing, after a fashion.  Reading aloud was common.  Even when many people gathered together, professional talent was rare.  Each person had his or her “party piece,” a song to sing or a poem to recite.  In fact, in our library is a “Popular Reciter,” a compendium of poems suitable for declaiming.  Requiring more coordination were amateur theatricals, plays performed and sometimes written at home, but they were common too.

All that changed with recorded music.  When one could command a whole orchestra of professional caliber by buying a photograph record, and especially after radio appeared, amateur entertainment faded out.  It didn’t disappear overnight, and indeed is not totally gone yet, but home-grown entertainment is the exception rather than the rule.  Living rooms are built around the wide-screen TV, not the piano or the place one could set up a cello for a group to hear.

This is by no means a completely bad thing.  The recitation of “Gunga Din” by a reluctant child can be excruciating.  And one’s musical and dramatic tastes can be refined and educated to a high degree by attending to the really excellent programs that are available.  But we regret the near-disappearance of amateur entertainment, however mediocre, for several reasons.

To begin with, we remember a trip to Ireland made by one of our consultants a few years ago, to visit some distant cousins.  High-quality recorded or broadcast music was just as available there as anywhere in the western world.  But as a matter of course, when the cousins went to the pub on Friday night they would themselves provide the music.  That was (and is, we hope) common there.  It cannot be a coincidence that the Irish produce more excellent musicians per capita than anywhere else we can think of.

Well, “nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be edible,” as one Irishman said (about poetry, not music).  But the quality of amateur musicians can in fact be very high.  We noted some time ago that music is one of several areas in which there are many more talented and motivated people than can make a living at it, and that holds for entertainment generally.

But the main reason we would like to see more amateur entertainment is that you are doing it yourself.  Rather than passively watching and listening to some professional, you are active.  And we won’t attempt to describe just why first-hand beats second-hand by a wide margin (though this song might give you a taste of it).

Alas, the trumpet or viola that you rented for school is probably long gone.  And the Christmas Eve play that was a tradition in one family we know for 60 years is probably not coming back (it’s been tried).  But maybe there’s something you could do.  Perhaps a piano instead of a second wide-screen TV?