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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Actors pretending to play musical instruments
Message-ID: <432@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Apr-85 18:33:19 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.432
Posted: Wed Apr 17 18:33:19 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Apr-85 03:50:26 EST
Organization: U. Chicago - Computer Science
Lines: 28

>OK, I've had just about enough of watching people - often well paid,
>highly trained actors and actresses - trying to look like they know how
>to play the piano or the trombone or something in the movies.  

Hear hear.  I cringe whenever a pseudopianist sits down at the
keyboard.  They don't show the hands, of course, and from the front
the pianist looks like he/she is doing the ironing or washing dishes
or something.  

Then there are the pseudoconductors pseudoconducting a
pseudoorchestra.  They rap their stands for attention (at the
beginning of a formal concert) and then pretend to conduct by running
through their repertoire of mincing, affected gestures.  

This is just one aspect of the way the fine arts are usually
portrayed on the average schlock television show.  Classical music is
an abstruse mystery performed by elderly men with long hair, opera an
affectation of the rich, dance an inane twinkletoes routine for
sissies....  It's nauseating to any music lover or art lover, but
evidently it sells more Maxipads and breath deodorant to the Great
Unwashed Masses.  I once watched in fascinated horror a program about
a Concert Pianist who had made his fame and fortune as a great
classical artist by composing a piece called The Scarlet Waltz, which
when performed turned out to be a semi-pop tune that wouldn't have
made it onto the Lawrence Welk show.  But after all, we live in a
country where Liberace can give concerts and not be put to death.

Richard Carnes