Abstract :
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].
