 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
In Reply to: Scary stuff, Clark... posted by C.B. on July 12, 2003 at 08:45:55:
There are several problems all contributing to the decline of classical music and the arts in general. Let's start with The fact that public entertainment has changed in the past 50 years. Television. Used to be radio, public perfomance of music, reading, even broadcast and spectator sports all required an attention span much longer than just about anything today. I hate to mention it but reorded music was the first of the real criminals in reducing the attention span of the public. Had to fit a whole song on one side of a 78. Of course the most pernicious thing in the lastpart of the twentieth century was the coming of SESAME STREET. All those children exposed to and conditioned to 90 second segments with jumbled jump cuta in order not to bore the little monsters. Your PBS contributions helped pay for this sort of travesty.
Symphonies and large scale music require the ability to focus without strain. The cultural and media conditioning processes we have all allowed ourselves to be exposed to are a huge part of the problem.
Follow Ups:
Your point on Sesame Street is highly accurate in my experience as an educator. Student attention span is pathetic these days and much of that can be laid at the door of Sesame Street, with reinforcement by MTV et al. Plus, kids just want to be entertained, not realizing that learning is entertaining. Small children are usually most entertained when learning to do something new.Look at ads these days and movies. Many shots are held for only a second, a few seconds at the most. This does enormous harm to attention spans. What people fail to realize is that this is not very natural, except when adrenaline starts flight or fight reactions.
Sigh, sigh, sigh. What hath pop culture wrought?
Sorry, but I don't see how the 78 rpm disc relates to the decay of attention spans for longer pieces of music.Composers of art music from Bach and Couperin through Debussy and Satie were writing many pieces of music that would fit easily onto one side of a 78 rpm disc. And if the highbrow music lover in the 1930s had to plow through four dozen 78 rpm discs to hear the whole of La Boheme, they would do so gladly, and there were plenty of record companies to oblige what, even then, was a minority taste.
If it were simply about the time limitations of the medium, surely we would have witnessed an INCREASE in attention spans since the advent of the CD and the attendant possibility of listening to a single, hour-long composition without interruption. Think about that: a piece of technology that many of we audiophiles detest for the way it was foisted upon us by the recording industry has actually ENHANCED the ability of people with longer attention spans to indulge them.
Modern technology makes possible 8, 10, 12 hour movies about topics of the gravity of Napoleon, Hitler or the Holocaust. The question is, why do so few people WANT to watch them in the first place.
Yes, certainly part of the problem has to do with commercial broadcasting, whether radio or TV, and its increasing interruption of content by advertizing. But I think the problem has as much to do with how much there is to pay attention to these days as it is with our ability to pay attention to one thing for any length at all. And it's about HOW we pay attention.
You mention sports activities. Well, I think in the first place that I'm not so sure people ever paid undivided attention to them. But more importantly, consider the irony that a spectator at a baseball game today faces a demand on his or her attention approximately half as much more than that facing a spectator at the beginning of the 20th century: as a result of all the breaks for advertizing and other nonsense like the singing of patriotic songs, an average game today lasts closer to 3 hours than 2.
Again, the point is not about paying attention to one thing for a certain length of time, but about being asked to pay attention to a number of different things ALL THE BLOODY TIME.
I still think there has been an erosion in the ability to concentrate in most people. To many bright and shinies, add that to the cult of insant gratification and we can agree the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
I might have agreed with you, but what you have written flies straight in the face of my experience. I watch more television than I care to admit. I watched Sesame Street when I was young (I'm 44 now). But I also got bitten by Beethoven, Gershwin, Tchaikovsky and Falla when I was 5. There were germs of musical ideas in that music that compelled me to focus on and absorb large scale works whole, later in life. I started playing an instrument and writing music in 5th grade. I brought a Strauss waltz record to school for show-and-tell once, and the class fell asleep. Even the teacher was bored and stopped the record after a few seconds. But I LOVE it, and the rewards are more soul-fulfilling and mentally stimulating than anything else in life I can imagine. I just don't think that the media conditioning process is, in large part, the reason why most kids don't love it. I don't have an answer myself, but I think it's important, and I'm saddened by the thought of how our society may become if it continues the way it is.
There you go helping to prove my point. My comments were ,incompletely i admit, an addition to the previous postings on this thread. Somewhere along the line you were exposed to good things at an early age. I to heard all sorts of music in my childhood, pretty much everything from Duane Eddy to Sibelius, not to mention Texaco Opera broadcasts. I never did develop a taste for grand opera. Suffice it to say there was music in the house and learning to play an instrument was encouraged. Plus in Rhode Island there used to be a wonderfull program called Project Discovery. It supported trips to see live music and theater as well as resident artists and touring music and theater at the schools.
I would be willing to bet that in large degree most members of this community share similar exposure to the arts.
I know I proved your point, to a certain extent anyway. But it's impossible to say for sure. I could just as easily have heard that music and felt nothing at all. I agree that we should try to maximize the odds of a talented young person out there catching the "bug" and developing what might become a great musical voice, but blaming government and corporate culture because the odds aren't as high as we would like them to be is a generalization that doesn't make sense. There's no direct correlation.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
