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Quotation of the Day for June 5, 2013"We made another discovery on that trip. The world of music - a world so important to both of us - suffers from a lack of serendipity. My son is a member of the download generation, which finds its music online. I grew up in a world dominated by that great and subversive force of the 20th Century - radio....White kids, alone in their rooms, tuned their radios at night and heard the music of black America. Black kids found "The Grand Ole Opry," and learned for themselves about that old, weird America. "The result in my childhood was a serendipitous exposure to music that no amount of downloading can duplicate. As a kid, I'd turn on the radio and hear Frank Sinatra, followed by James Brown, followed by the Beatles, followed by the Supremes ... and lots of other people. Music could astonish me. But now, with downloading, it has lost that ability. We miss the element of the chance encounter with musical genius. We have to be told of such genius or hear about it second-hand. One effect is that it's balkanized the audience. We don't have the sense of community. My older children, in their 20s, envy my generation. "We'll never get to fall in love to the great music you had," my oldest daughter once told me." - William McKeen, writing in The New York Times. [http://www.nytimes.com/ref/college/coll08McKEEN.html] Submitted by: Terry Labach May 28, 2013  |
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