Music is no longer something you produce. It is something you consume. And it is available everywhere, for free, without effort, in a thousand varieties. Why trouble to sing when you can get a far better noise by pressing a button? As for those difficult skills that were once required to get a household through a winter evening — piano-playing, part-singing, chamber music — these now fall on the wrong side of a new class divide: the divide created by digital technology, between those who merely use it, and those who depend upon it like an umbilical cord.
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The new media, which were supposed to put people in closer contact with each other, have in fact increased the distance between them. Music is going the way of meals, drinks and sex, all of which are ceasing to be occasions for bonding and becoming sources of solitary addiction instead. Humanity is being divided in two by its own inventions. On the one side are the IT-savvy nerds, who do not relate to each other directly, but have mastered all the ways of achieving satisfaction from digital substitutes. On the other side are the savages, as Aldous Huxley might have called them, who sit down to meals with their families, and who drink and sing madrigals with their friends like Samuel Pepys. And the two classes are increasingly estranged from each other, since the moments in which they might have united, as people unite through singing, no longer exist.
Here's the whole column-- and he's not the only one who is noticing these things.
As you might imagine, my primary concern is for congregational singing in worship (though the loss of whistling down the street is sad too, don't you think?). How do the ways we most often use and experience music then affect the way that we participate in music, if we do at all?
Are these just inevitable changes, or do we set boundaries, develop habits, or create experiences and opportunities so as to impede or at least offset these trends?
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