Notes and Comments: No. 12

Anyway, here we have the return of the Notes & Comments strand.

To start with, we return to one of the major – if no the major – themes of this blog – cultural decline. Now we see how it can be exacerbated when there are certain truths become too inconvenient for people to hear. I was under the impression that one of the primary functions of an education was to challenge the received opinion from the home, received prejudice, widen children’s horizons, and so forth. Perhaps history lessons ought to contain something about the dangers of appeasement instead.

Speaking of challenge in the education sector, Boris (as Usual) raises an important point with his usual style.

Both the above are linked – I believe – by a loss of what…?

Confidence, or something like that, I suppose. I haven’t quite got my finger on it enough to put it down in a sentence or two, but I’m increasingly of the view that the great liberal-left revolution (mainly in the 60s, of course) was a major step in the wrong direction rather than the great leap forward we so blithely like to assume.

For example, we now have this, something that was very, very rare when I was at school, despite it being a pretty tough school, infamous for the savagery of its girl’s netball team.

Is it true Classical Music recording is dying? Martin Kettle thinks it could be. True the ridiculous number of interpretations of the standard repertoire is silly, especially when compared to pop/rock where there is only one Sgt. Pepper, Blonde On Blonde, Electric Ladyland and so on. Yes, rock did change the landscape, but when it failed to reach its promise or potential and became moribund as it slipped back into being just pop music – arguably around the 80s - that too is over now too. I think the very ubiquity of music these days has led to its devaluation where all our lives seem to have their own constant individual soundtrack. But, as for modern pop and rock, its ubiquity makes it mediocre and its mediocrity makes it ubiquitous.