In a class I showed the engraving video that has made its way around the music blogs lately. If you have a broadband connection you can see it here:
Part way through (and I'm serious here) a student said, "Wait, haven't they been using Finale since like the 19th century?"
I performed a sort of stuttering combination of sentence beginnings without any endings, "They uh, " "No um..." "What do you..." "Finale wasn't really..." Finally another student saved me by saying something like, "they didn't even have computers back then you idiot."
Now I'm pretty sure he realized how dumb his question was almost as soon as he uttered it, but I guess it is a common mistake all of us tend to make. That is, the impression that nothing existed before you were born. For instance, the 60's and the Civil Rights movement seems like history to me, and the cold war is something I barely know anything about. Why? Because the only people that would have told me, wouldn't have realized that I didn't already know. I can imagine myself sitting in a class at some point and blurting out, "Haven't we been traveling to the moon for like the last hundred years?" I imagine the previous generation knew little about the Great Depression, and the earlier one couldn't imagine a world without automobiles. Things are only changing faster and faster. Kids can't imagine a time before the internet, soon the time before cell phones will be history. You know, when I was a kid, Cars had wheels that were always on the ground. And we had to drive them ourselves!
