Even if we didn’t have the ticker-tape distractions of Twitter and Facebook, and if YouTube were just a sci-fi fantasy, the average person of 2013 would still be intimidated by an historical and cultural burden many times heavier than for the most learned individual of 1713.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
In a (relatively) open, global culture, we have the literatures, sculptures, crafts, musics and other cultural artefacts of hundreds of peoples, nations, eras, movements and millennia available to us. There is more to learn, consider and understand today than ever before in human history.
And we’ve had to balance the old histories of the victors and colonizers against the stories of the colonized and the vanquished — and of all the other voices exiled from old accounts, including those of women.
What’s a person to choose?
A few days ago, British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies joined the chorus of doomsayers, insisting that we are going to cultural hell in a gaudy handbag. As he told The Telegraph in this article: “There are hundreds of thousands of youngsters who now have never even heard of Mozart or Beethoven. It is shocking and a disgrace that has been allowed to happen… The same applies to Shakespeare and Dickens. It just shows what has gone wrong with areas of the educational system.”
Set against this is an academic culture of hyper-specialization, where more and more people dig deeper and deeper into esoterica rather than attempt syntheses of overwhelming mountains of material.
It’s nothing new, as I was reminded while reading Ancient Greek scholar Benjamin Jowett’s 1871 introduction to Phaedrus, one of Plato’s Dialogues, on the subway on Tuesday. He complained of intellectualism and scientific thought being obsessed with analysis over discerning larger truths.
What would Jowett be saying today?
In music alone, how many great composers have there been since Johannes Brahms? In how many countries? And in how many genres?
You can’t blame anyone for turning back to their #RobFord and #TOpoli Twitter feeds for instant distraction instead.
My question is this: What if the perceived deterioration in general cultural awareness, the decline of the popularity of Liberal Arts at universities, and the decline in interest in traditional art music concerts is not about Justin Bieber’s antics, but a natural and generationally inevitable reaction to the sheer excess of cultural material available to each and every one of us?
What if Twitter and Facebook are merely convenient scapegoats?
How much, exactly, is a Torontonian or New Yorker or Londoner of 2013 supposed to know in order to be considered well-read, or culturally aware, or adequately prepared to participate in a democratic society?
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
