on "progress", like it or not...

[acroyear]

Ron Burk: Let Mozart Be Dead Already:

As technology accelerates, the conservative desire for "simpler times" is made both more acute and more contradictory. For people are rarely willing to give up anything to get back to simpler times -- they only want undesirable things taken away. Note that at its peak, conservatism in America did absolutely nothing to swell the ranks of the Amish. The folks most deeply concerned about retaining "traditional" gun rights are still pretty much eating corn-fed meat that was killed in a pen with a steel slug coming out of a compressed air hose, friendo.

Here, then, is my common ground with Neil Postman. For he was clear that technology always gets used, and it always brings both advantages and drawbacks. His call was for a discussion on how to minimize those drawbacks before a new technology (like electronic voting machines) takes over and has its way. Unfortunately, such a discussion is virtually impossible. America has a highly optimized machine for taking any national topic of discussion and turning it immediately into a red-vs.-blue search for advantage or slander. There just ain't nearly enough of us watching C-SPAN, I'm afraid, instead of the daily news frenzy shows.

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't really agree with his statement that, 'you can't appreciate X if you don't have the necessary training.' I think that's arrogant BS. You might have a deeper understanding, but music is music. You either enjoy it or you don't, and that doesn't require deep understanding.

As for his last sentence above, it is because C-SPAN isn't as entertaining. Maybe if they have fistfights like in some asian countries, maybe more people would tune in.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

"appreciate" is a loaded term. Like "theory" in science, it means something different within music education than it does to the layman, and given the context, i'm guessing he meant it in the academic way.

personally, i think academic music's use of the term was never really necessary, but it is a legacy going back to the 20s that we're stuck with. Really, it is musical aesthetics, but that term wasn't really vogue until the 60s.