Born again or 'dumbing down'? Cultural trends in the 1990s

A person who everyday looks upon a beautiful picture, reads a page from some good book, and hears a beautiful piece of music will soon became a transformed person - one born again [Labour, 1997]. Across the world, music audiences are being eroded by an array of domestic electronic attractions. Habitual concertgoers fear to venture into the inner city after dark, or get deterred by traffic jams and parking restrictions. A new generation raised on television soundbites and instant hamburgers has been jaggedly desensitised to the stately magniloquence of an hour-long symphony. The sharing of music within families has been blighted by the decline of the nuclear family. Music teaching, insofar as it is still provided in public school systems, has been rendered almost worthless by a politically correct tendency to treat all musics as equal - the primitive with the refined, the commercial with the spiritual [Lebrecht, 1996]. © NSEAD, 1998.