I like classical music. I will often listen to it playing quietly in the background while I work or on the road stuck in traffic. Classical music draws from a deeper source in us than the surface stimuli demand with which we have to contend in daily life and carries us to places of real thought and introspection, sad ones as well as joy and triumph on occasion. Australian pianist Anna Goldsworthy laments its imminent passing and examines it in a long article in The Monthly.
Goldsworthy notes that the average age of classical concerts has risen from age 30 in 1937 to 65 or above today. She examines some of the culprits: ADD among listeners (i.e. - hitting the clicker), the association with snobbish elites, and the lowest common denominator effect of television with its snippets of music reduced to jingles and silly songs.
A huge reason is that children never learn to like classical music because they are not exposed to it. Goldsworthy says that:
"Research suggests that only 23% of government schools offer “continuous and developmental” music education, compared to 88% of independent schools. None of this bodes well for audience renewal, and, more problematically, it is a serious equity issue. Children of privilege enjoy the benefits of early music training, and the gap widens. It is no surprise that classical music becomes elitist, when only the privileged are taught its language."
She continues:
In my darkest moments, I wonder whether a transgenerational empathy is still possible, or whether we are drifting so far from the world of Beethoven and Schubert that they will soon have nothing to say to us. And if Beethoven becomes mute, Shakespeare cannot be much further behind.
Indeed that is true and I suspect that we are very near the end of the road or have even entered a new Dark Age. But why? The reviewer of Goldsworthy's piece has the answer.
William Bigelow, writing for Breitbart, makes this incisive point at the end of his review:
" ... Goldsworthy misses the essential point: art is a reflection of the values espoused by its culture, not an essential pillar on which the culture stands. It is an ancillary aspect of the culture, not a fundamental element of its survival. What Goldsworthy and many other artists ignore is that the two fundamental pillars of Western culture, the nuclear family and Western Judeo-Christian values, are being savaged and left for dead by those who wish to destroy the West. If those two fulcrums of Western civilization are destroyed, the death of all Western traditions will inevitably follow, including classical music."
And Shakespeare, and ... You cannot have the nectar without the flower and as scripture reminds us, who is the One who clothes the lilies of the field? Matthew 6:28-30. Goldsworthy has written a thought-provoking article, but I hope that she and her fellow artists will walk the last mile and understand what, or rather Who, underlies all of creation.
www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/25/real-reason-death-classical-music/
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