[Harp-L] Popper-the lightning rod

["Glenn Weiser" <celticguitar1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Message: 5
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2005 22:36:54 -0500
From: Cara Cooke <cyberharp@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Harp-L]you know who
To: Barbara Butler <bsvb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Harp-L@xxxxxxxxxx
Message-ID: <c1406ac1050809203626f0ea5c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

All I can say, Barbara, is that we do ourselves a disservice when we are too
critical of another player, especially to that player's fans. It makes us
look worse than the person we criticized, and can, in some cases, drive
those people away, rather than introduce them to a player we like better.

 Often, the players to which we are most attracted at a particular point in
our development, are conveying ideas that guide us to improve our
playing. Eventually,
as we develop, we may "outgrow" our old favorite players to pick up new
favorites who are conveying that which will aid in our next
development. However,
those old favorites may never go away completely because, as we learn more,
we understand more about their playing and continue to learn from it. So,
criticism of a particular player to that player's fan is generally unwise if
your intent was to encourage them to improve and hear someone else. They are
a fan because the player's playing is, for some reason, attractive and
educational to them. You may not understand it or like it, but it speaks to
that fan; and until he is ready to move on, the only thing you can hope to
achieve is to discourage the fan completely. We can encourage others to
listen to our favorites without criticizing their favorites.

 This John Popper thing came up at SPAH last year, by the way, and nearly
totally confused and discouraged one of our newest, talented players. I
helped him clear it up and reminded him that he may actually 'get' John
Popper's playing even better than those people who were criticizing him,
especially since it was John Popper's playing that had encouraged him and
guided him to take up the harmonica in the first place. But the incident
caused me to wonder if those mouthy critics of John Popper could remember
that the 'P' in SPAH stood for "Preservation" and the 'A' for "Advancement".

 Cara
_____

Ah, John Popper, that veritable lightning rod for criticism.
I have long been a critic of Popper's playing, as I think it's it's the
epitome of bad taste. He seems to have an absolute phobia of sweet lyrical
phrarses with-omigod-long notes. John Pareles, chief pop music critic of the
New York Times, panned his playing as a an excercise of trying to fit as
many notes into a measure as possible, and added something like "dizzying
runs that go up and down the scale and end nowhere."
Freedom of expression must be tolerated here, and if someone just can't
stand his playing, they should be able to express that. I certainly respect
the opinions of his fans.
And in Popper's defense, as I've said before, there are these points-
1. He's done a lot to popularize the instrument, and deserves credit for
that.
2. For better or worse, he's crafted an original style-very hard to do.
3. He's made a good living playing harp, too. Even harder to do.
4. Like me, he's from New Jersey. The boy can't be all bad, now.

Glenn Weiser
http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/harppage.htm