Re: [Harp-L] Chugging and Choo-Choo Noises

[Joseph Leone <3n037@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's all socialogical Neil. One would be hard pressed to find a people whom have gone through more misery (to wit: floods, famine, disease, wars, being buried alive, etc.) than the Chinese. 
YET, they never developed a 'Blues culture'. They get up at sunrise, work their buns off till dusk. And the diatonic is not in keeping with their mood. I (and this is just personally) feel that like
the Japanese two turns of the century ago (1900) copied the west, the current Chinese copy the west to some extent. 

Now on to the feeling that diatonic is ignored compared to chromatic. I don't know as this feeling can be rationalized. They DO use a lot of stacked tremellos. And I am unaware of ANY program(s) in the U.S. 
which promote ANY harmonica and don't treat it as a toy. Most of the professional grade players I have known (Leighton, Schackner, Harper, Murad, etc.) learned on their own. No training. But in China there
ARE programs. Now possibly the students are being subsidized in some way. Like a starter instrument? I don't know. But it seems to me that the children over there are being introduced to harmonica in a
structured manner. And what goes with structure? Reading music. So, naturally most written music is not (as a general rule) composed with a diatonic instrument in mind. 

Smo-joe (just my observationary opinion)


On Oct 17, 2014, at 11:13 AM, Harmonicology [Neil Ashby] wrote:

> The issue (would I have been in any way unclear) is that children in China are more often introduced to the Chromatic harmonica than in the United States. Why?
> 
> /Neil
>