The Tragic Decline of Music Literacy (and Quality)


128x128sejodiren
@mahgister,

"Incredible..... Without history people are pathetically lost about societal issues...How easy it is to manipulate the brain of someone knowing no history....How difficult it is to try that with an educated man...."



This is the point. History itself is under attack, along with truth.

How many of us are familiar with the old germ v terrain theory debate?

And why not? Could it be that the pharmaceuticals might be less than favourable to anything that challenges germ theory?

Education can be a wonderful roadmap for the journey ahead, but it’s only that.

No more than a map.

Better than nothing for sure. Otherwise you are at great risk of being manipulated. Usually for the goal of increasing someone’s profits.

In any case musical literacy matters less and less today due to technology. It didn’t even matter that much in the days of the Beatles. Remember they couldn’t even read or write music, just chords.

Luckily for them they had George Martin and they still had to build songs up by constant rehearsal.

I suspect the way most songs are assembled today are quite different. And a different set of skills are required. The only thing that counts is the end result. Everything is geared towards that goal.

Sales.

In that way nothing has changed. Today’s artists are still doing what Bing, Frank, Nat, Elvis, Buddy, and the Beatles were all trying to do - make money.

I don’t believe any of them were trying to make art that would last even 50 years. But they did.

Yet who knows what tomorrow’s audience will be into? Artists like authors are also prone to the vagaries of fashion.

W Somerset Maugham was the best selling author in the world in the 40s and 50s. How many read him now?

Maybe it's not about the decline of musical standards after all?

Maybe it never was?

Maybe instead it's only more about the decline of our generation?

Great Post....

I concur with you on all points...

And why not? Could it be that the pharmaceuticals might be less than favourable to anything that challenges germ theory?
They are 2 points in one here and very important one...

By lack of education most have forgotten that science is never and never will be anything else than an history of science...Dixit Goethe :

«History of science IS science» Majuscules are mine...

And techology power and technocratic authoritharism with money power combined is the absolute negation of science.... Transhumanism is a religion of the worst kind....

It will be easy to deconstruct it entirely with a Cassirean analysis of the symbolic form, like the one Cassirer himself did about Nazism in his days and under it exiled in the US...



Music being also a symbolic form, the analysis of the decline of music must be an analysis of the decline of all the other artistic forms in the repolarization of the values dominating european and Occidental culture and civilization...

This forgotten values origin and source explain the drying up of the blood life of Occidental spirit and his freezing up under the techocratic refrigerator....


I guess I understand, although I will never agree with, the prevalent mistrust and dismissal of rap on this forum. Maybe it reflects the aging white demographic that is many of the members here, but to write off a brilliant art form with so many gifted and talented artists has rap and hip-hop has seems short-sighted.
I guess I understand, although I will never agree with, the prevalent mistrust and dismissal of rap on this forum. Maybe it reflects the aging white demographic that is many of the members here, but to write off a brilliant art form with so many gifted and talented artists has rap and hip-hop has seems short-sighted.
I am too old to like rap music in general , but i am enough young to appreciate the real poetry, and rythmic rethoric.... Then it will not change my musical taste but you were right about the ignorance linked to the complete dismissing....

Like for any musical form in considerations, there is "rap" and there is rap.... I already listened sometimes to some very beautiful rap artistically done....

It is like free jazz; there is indeed "free jazz" and free jazz.....And some free jazz is truly genius....Like some rap....

Music in all his manifestations are only many perspectives takes on the human soul, and most of us can only take a short part of this pie....

How many in america feel love for classical chinese erhu music? Or japan koto? Or Persian tanbur? Or arabic Oud ? Or Bulgarian folk voices?




History of mathematic is for me a part of the  history of the human spirit...
History of music and poetry  is part of the history of the human soul...
How many portion of these pies constitute also a part of our own spirit and soul journey in our less than one  century visit  on earth? Not so much....

These odds aren't necessarily positive, the most likely way for people who think this is a problem to reduce the problem is to do music themselves.