Ray, At 15:24 16/09/02 -0400, you wrote (towards the end of your latest piece): <<<< Most of the conversation about Art and music is embarrasing. Art was to bring insight to science. Today Science is the only God and we only observe Art when we are extremely hurt by life. Sort of like playing golf with diamonds because they are hard and don't break easily. Art will always be with us even after we have saturated our minds with Scientific and other knowledge to the ends of our capabilities. The muse will endure in the depths of our ugliness and will eventually bring us back to the light of our humanity screaming and kicking all the way. >>>>
At bottom, I agree with your sentiments about art and music. If I didn't, I wouldn't have devoted a great deal of my time (50+ hours a week in the last four/five years) to establishing a cheap source of good choral music that's either out-of-print or too expensive. (An Indonesian choir wrote me the other day that they hadn't got credit cards and could they pay me in rice?)(A joke, of course, and, of course, they got the music they wanted.) But there's beauty in science, too -- not at gadget level but at deeper levels where it touches on all the philosophical questions of the past. There's really no disjunction between the arts and the sciences, and it dismays me that you should so often pitch one against the other. Both have become bowdlerised. As far as the experience of both in the minds of the masses, both have become dumbed down and only a minority of the population appreciate them to their fullest extent. In my view, the cause of all this is partly due the all-too-easy technological growth and mass markets given by cheap oil and gas of the last 70 years or so, and partly the way in which the school curricula have been steered in order to maintain subtle status differences between the "intelligentsia" (by which I also include the pseudo-intelligentsia) and the hoi polloi. I see no way of reversing this until daily life requires a far higher degree of intellectual and creative endeavour -- and people become active participants in both and not passive recipients as now -- and I can't see this coming until cheap oil and gas finally peters out. But that's a long way away yet, and it's a matter of keeping the flame alive through what I feel sure will be catastrophic times in the coming decades as populations adjust to quite different survival conditions. So yes, I agree with your last sentence. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
