“Most children learn nothing about serious music in school and don’t expect to learn anything,” writes David Gelernter in Friday’s (3/20) Wall Street Journal. “Outside school, the music world is being upended and shaken vigorously. The ways we choose music and listen to it are being transformed by iTunes and Spotify and other such sites. For most young people, music is a minor consumable, like toothpaste.… We have the raw materials we need to change this state of affairs. Spotify and iTunes have plenty of classical music.… How do we turn these digital services into tools to educate our children? We use existing services to teach music at the simplest level and to build a grand musical marketplace in the cybersphere…. We need to make it easier for anyone to learn or teach or perform or just keep up-to-date. It would be simple to put together music-learning packages that are independent of iTunes or Spotify, that merely link to those sites or others.… We also have the means of building a great music city in the cybersphere, a central market where serious music comes from all over the world.… It only takes money and ideas and will. Not much money; lots of ideas, lots of will.”
Posted March 24, 2015
