I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.
Interpretation
Music should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their location or financial status.
Rhiannon Giddens emphasizes the necessity of making music an accessible experience for all people, transcending geographical and financial barriers. This quote highlights the cultural significance of music and the importance of inclusivity in ensuring that individuals from all walks of life can experience and benefit from the arts.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech advocating for community music programs.
When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.
I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.
In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.
The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?
You could say that my aim is βto recover the placeβ. The place is a result of nature and time; this is the most important aspect. I think my architecture is some kind of frame of nature. With it, we can experience nature more deeply and more intimately. Transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency.
The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.
When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.
How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.
The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth - that we have culture.
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