Miss Hanley

Most people buy ipods so they can listen to music, but I have an ipod so I can avoid listening to 'music.' Most bars, coffee shops and so on where I might otherwise enjoy sitting in silence are apt to play 'music,' which I use the music on my ipod to shut out. 'Music' I regard as that which has been used by the entertainment industry to cultivate a docile mass market of teenagers too ignorant to know any better. This is a strategy that has been in place since the fifties. This 'music' is otherwise known as "Rock and Roll." Real music demands one's total attention. 'Music,' if the sixties is any indication, causes brain damage. Especially in combination with marijuana.
Being a teenager at the time of its inception I was vulnerable to the media manipulation, too. Not for long. There was something about Elvis I never really liked and I soon noticed that I was only pretending to like him to be cool. At home I discovered the local classical music station and was enraptured among others by Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's Violin Concerto (Jascha Heifetz soloing the latter) Let's be kind: Elvis suffered by comparison. And so do the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all the subsequent icons of faux music.
In childhood I think I must have been inoculated against its ravages by a few good teachers and by the Walt Disney recording of "Peter and the Wolf." I say inoculation because I now regard Rock and Roll as a disease, a maladaptive mutation that has the same effect on music as phyloxera had on the vineyards of France, because it destroys the beautiful work of generations of careful and conscientious workers and several inspired geniuses.
I vividly remember the Peter and the Wolf recording. The composition was pretty new then, having been written by Prokofiev in 1936 and the popular music industry was quite open to real talent then. Disney made an animated feature out of it and the recording came from that. The production drew on a It doesn't seem to be available any more, maybe because it's not considered politically correct to have little boys wandering around in forests hunting wolves with a pop gun. In those days boys were good and wolves were bad, but today it's the other way around.
The name of the teacher I am thinking of was Miss Hanley, and she taught grade four at St. Margaret's Separate School in Edmonton. It was a time when a teacher taught the same class all day, every day. Arithmetic, social studies, language, catechism, she taught them all. And music. I think it was almost a requirement for employment that a teacher could play the piano. Anyway, I can still remember the day she took the class down to the music room and started to play the piano accompaniment to Schubert's setting of "Ave Maria." Schubert's melodies and piano accompaniments are very tightly interwoven and I was dumbfounded. The piano part didn't sound anything at all like the melody of the song. It took me a little while to grasp that idea but once I did I couldn't hear it often enough.
Thank you, Miss Hanley for the gift of Franz Schubert, and thank you Walt Disney (and Prokofiev, of course) for Peter and the Wolf.