How can music passed down from kilt-wearing shepherds of long ago have influence on us today? I have been spending a lot of our homeschool day focused on music with my kids this year and I think I may have the answer.
When you have a kid whose whole reason for being is to listen to, play, and compose music, you spend a lot of time trying to tie what most interests her to what you need her to learn. We tie music to math (note values and fractions). We tie music to physics (frequency and sound). And, we tie music to history.
It is absolutely amazing how fundamentally music has influenced the history of America. So much music we listen to today has its roots in the unique rhythms and phrases of Irish or Scottish music. Often promotion of culture in our country ignores those cultures responsible for the formation of our country and it’s great experiment: our constitution.
Take a listen… you may get hooked on it as I have, or you may not.
But you will recognize how wildly optimistic, deeply thoughtful, and faithfully happy the Scotch-Irish culture is.
And if you think about it, that culture has been passed down to all of us as Americans.
