Over the course of my life, I have watched an already impoverished oral culture collapse almost entirely. For example, when I was a little boy in Detroit in the mid-1960s it was thought a violation of decorum for children to knock on the door (let alone ring the doorbell—God forbid!) to call their friends out to play. Instead, we sang their names from the doorstep. Imagine what hearing your name sung does to the soul? I think we have lost so much more than we realize.
In this short video, I discuss this phenomenon of cultural atrophy, a reverie inspire by my recent acquisition of the book Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes by Lina Eckenstein and published in London by Duckworth & Co. in 1906—which acquisition inspired me to dig up my venerable copy of Walter de la Mare’s wonderful anthology, Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages, first published in1923.
Through the course of the discussion, I break out my setting of “Ariel’s Song” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (which de la Mare includes in his anthology).
Here’s a clip from May 2002, when I directed my Waldorf class in The Tempest and you can hear the same songs in their proper context—with rapper Big Sean (when he was still Little Sean) in the role of Ferdinand.
and here’s “Where the Bee Sucks”
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