Allan Bloom (1930-1992),
The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 69:
Classical music is dead among the young. This assertion will,
I know, be hotly disputed by many who, unwilling to admit tidal changes,
can point to the proliferation on campuses of classes in classical music
appreciation and practice, as well as performance groups of all kinds.
Their presence is undeniable, but they involve not more than 5 to 10
percent of the students. Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek
language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most
middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the
home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good
for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part
of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their
lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction
between educated and uneducated in America. Many, or even most, of
the young people of that generation also swung with Benny Goodman,
but with an element of self-consciousness—to be hip, to prove they
weren't snobs, to show solidarity with the democratic ideal of a pop
culture out of which would grow a new high culture. So there remained
a class distinction between high and low, although private taste was
beginning to create doubts about whether one really liked the high very
much. But all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned and
unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few have any
acquaintance at all with classical music. This is a constant surprise to me.
Id., p. 75:
One need
only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much
of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon
is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and
continues through the college years. It is the youth culture and, as I have
so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the
spirit. Some of this culture's power comes from the fact that it is so loud.
It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be
without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friend
ship and the only true common ground. With rock, illusions of shared
feelings, bodily contact and grunted formulas, which are supposed to
contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis of association.
None of this contradicts going about the business of life, attending classes
and doing the assignments for them. But the meaningful inner life is with
the music.
This phenomenon is both astounding and indigestible, and is hardly
noticed, routine and habitual. But it is of historic proportions that a
society's best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People
of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible
as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and
gladiatorial combats. It may well be that a society's greatest madness
seems normal to itself.