Classical Music in a Changing Culture by Vroon Donald;

Author:Vroon, Donald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

First published in the July/August 2006 issue of the American Record Guide.

Attentiveness II

Classical music now accounts for about 2% of record sales in the USA, down from 20% in the 1960s. Attendance at all classical music events is down 25% to 33% in the past 10 years. Classical music is fading away, cast aside by a sloppy and inattentive culture. And what is happening to classical music is only a symptom of what is increasingly wrong with our entire way of life.

We have complained before that Americans seem to only want to be entertained. They have no intellectual appetites; they seek nothing for the life of the mind or the soul. They attend to nothing that requires mental effort; they want to be distracted, not required to pay attention. As one writer put it, we need to be distracted from our fragmented and solitary lives because distractions have made our lives fragmented and solitary.

Education in its classical form tries to get us to banish all the distractions, to rise above the need to be entertained. We all started out in school with a teacher who made us aware that it was necessary to “pay attention.” The students who paid attention did much better in school than the ones who were always distracted. Of course! And the worker who gives his job his full attention also does far better work, all his life. And the people who live attentively—who give their full attention to whatever they do—live much happier lives, because they experience everything to the full. They don’t walk through a garden and not see the flowers; if they walk through a garden they pay attention to the garden. If they eat, they pay attention to the food. They relish every flavor. When they are having sex, they give it their full attention, so they enjoy it much more than other people do. They savor life, because they notice everything—and that is because they developed from childhood the virtue of attentiveness. Conversely, they swore off the distractedness that characterizes most people. That is, they don’t waste hours of their life on mere entertainment. And they don’t multitask. When they drive, they drive—they don’t eat, drink, text, talk on the phone. When they listen to music, they listen to music. They don’t try to do six other things at the same time. “Multitasking” guarantees that everything you are doing will be badly done. (This has been proved!)

Our kind of music requires attentive listeners and cannot make much of an impression on the average distracted person. But that is true of all forms of greatness and happiness and pleasure. Living in a culture that promotes distraction and distractedness in everything, we are losing a taste for greatness. Our lives are getting emptier and emptier. We have our pseudo-connectedness in cell phones and Facebooks, but every survey shows that neither is satisfying—neither satisfies the simple human need for real relationships with other people. (Of course not; they don’t offer the real thing at all—just a cheap imitation.

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