https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYua80VEcBk

This is a fantastic analysis of modern music and the effects on society. I just found out about this gentleman.

Thanks very much for posting Scruton's brief lecture on popular music, which is really about the importance of the Western classical musical tradition in developing a sense that there is such a thing as better and worse music, and retraining young people to hear the difference--particularly by making music themselves. His objection is not really to popular music per se--if it is done well--but to the ubiquity of "Muzak" and the absence of silence in our communal lives.

For some reason as a youngster I developed a taste for classical music; I never learned to play an instrument, but I did develop an appreciation for the classical composers, then began singing in choruses and choirs. Music--and singing in particular--is an extremely important part of my life (far more than guns, by the way). Music is also a vital part of my religious life; my prayers are often hymns. And there again, the "tyranny of pop" has deprived young people of the melodic beauty and theological depth present in traditional hymns, now sung mostly only in memorial services like the one for a church friend we had yesterday. Given the choice, worshippers would, I'm sure, prefer those old hymns to the new pop praise songs, if they had had the opportunity to hear them when young as I did.

Roger Scruton died in early 2020; he was a British conservative philosopher, very highly regarded in conservative intellectual circles (yes, there is such a thing).

From his Wikipedia entry:

quote:

Scruton embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he held several part-time academic positions, including in the United States.[6] In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998.[7] Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".[8]

Now I've found what is for me an interesting article by Scruton, on the website theimaginativeconservative.com. I don't seek conservative cultural opinion often, but when I do (voice of The Most Interesting Man in the World)I go to theimaginativeconservative.com.

Scruton: Modern Music: Groans Wrapped in Mathematics

Thus endeth the rant of this old curmudgeon. Thanks again for posting.