“Music has been a lifeline during this year of Covid, but we haven’t all dabbled in drumming or taken up the trombone,” writes Richard Lea in Saturday’s (4/3) Guardian (U.K.). “Instead … lockdown has boosted streaming by 22%…. As Michael Spitzer points out [in his new book The Musical Human], this shift towards isolated listening is only the latest stage in a transition from active participation in music to our passive consumption of it that has been going on for thousands of years…. Nursery rhymes, recorder groups and school choirs keep us making music during our primary years, but before reaching adulthood most westerners choose not to pursue it—a development Spitzer blames on the cult of genius, the church and Guido d’Arezzo, the Italian monk who invented staff notation in the 11th century.… The book traces a line from the rhythm of walking on two legs, through the repeated impacts of making stone tools and the percussive banging used to drive animals away, so that music carves out a place to live safely…. He greets the contemporary split between professional performers and passive consumers with little more than a shrug: ‘We are where we are, and it is where it is.’ ”
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