On Feb 20, 2007, at 1:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Just a quick recall of the bells and Pavlov's dogs should
illustrate what happens with repeated stimulus; If they salivate
whenever
they hear a bell now, when someone who has systematically and
subconsciously shut down their antennae to music, what do you think
happens when they get in a concert hall (if they even go)?
Pavlov's dogs salivated because they had been taught to associate the
sound of a bell w. the provision of food. Where's the analogy?
Do you honestly
believe that they still have the same facility to hear/perceive music
as
well as they could before the saturation syndrome? I'm not talking
about
the "educated" and disciplined listeners who are dedicated to their
appreciation of music (like the readers of the Copland book); I'm
talking
about the millions of every day folk who are becoming numbed to the
experience through no fault of their own. And who will not seek it out
as
a consequence of the overexposure. If I'm wrong, I don't see anything
to
support your claim that it's garbage: everything I see leads me to the
conclusions I've made.
The tendency to view popular music with alarm is very old. Decriers of
ragtime, early jazz, and rock-n-roll in their day all took the exact
same position that you are taking: that popular music deadens the soul
and makes it impervious to more sophisticated fare. Theodor Adorno
built an entire career on this notion, presenting it at book length in
his most opaque German (translated into equally opaque English).
Charles Ives and T.S. Eliot both decried "phonographs and gasoline" as
spiritually deadening--which a century of subsequent history has proven
they are not.
All these critics have it upside down: popular music is composed and
distributed because it is what people want to hear. It is just not true
to assert that the music comes first and is imposed manipulatively upon
an unthinking populace. What is going on here is basic
supply-and-demand, nothing else.
All that has changed--the *only* thing--is that people can get
*whatever* music they want more easily, quickly, and in greater variety
than ever before. Popular music is by definition the music of the great
mass of people, and therefore the greatest mass of available music will
be popular music. Nothing is being forced on anyone, and no-one is
forced to hear music they don't seek out. (Musak and its ilk have been
around for 50 years and are no more pervasive now than when first
introduced).
As a child of my generation, I am aurally familiar with all 107 Haydn
symphonies, which nobody of any previous generation (except Haydn
himself!) could say. Am I therefore to be deemed less able to
appreciate them--or other music--than the less Haydn-saturated folk of
yore? Or does classical music saturation not count, somehow?
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