Don Satz suggests reasons for the young preferring popular music to
classical:

>>1.  Having their own music ...
>>2.  Peer Pressure -
>>3.  Young persons have high energy and relatively low attention spans.

And Julia Werthimer wrote:

>It seems to me that a young person today has to be very independent in
>his/her thinking in order to break out of this overwhelmingly commercial
>teenage culture and develop interests (musical or otherwise) which are not
>dictated by it.

I used to agree with Don on this.  Now I think Julia has it right, but it's
taken me a long time to get to that point.  If I read her correctly, she's
saying essentially, that we get the kids we raise and the kids we allow our
culture to raise.  In a sense, we get what we settle for.

This brings up something poignant for me.  I don't have children, and
this was my choice (partly, obviously).  Much of the reason, valid or not,
is my own experience in life:  as a child, as a student in our public
schools, as a public school teacher, and as an observer of American kids.
I didn't like what I saw and wanted no part of it.  I had no confidence in
my ability to raise kids who would have values closer to my own than to
Madison Avenue, to the "other kids," and to kids I knew (and myself, for
that matter) growing up.  I did not think I could beat the system.  It was
dumb luck that I didn't end up a dumb jock myself.

When I moved to Boston, I discovered that I might have been wrong about
kids, but it was a long-term discovery.  I am generally uncomfortable
around children, but my neighbors had a child around whom I was very
comfortable.  His mother was European, and his upbringing was both
loving and strict.  You could visit them and not have the entire evening
revolve around the demands of the child.  He participated, and he did so
intelligently:  he did not take over.  You could tell he was raised that
way.  He was a fine young man then and he's a fine young man now.

My greatest revelation was attending a concert by one of the Boston
area youth orchestras (high school kids), conducted by Ben Zander.  (PBS
periodically has specials on this group:  they're worth watching.  This is
a most remarkable group:  they have even toured.) They played the Eroica
Symphony, an incredible task, I would think, for kids this age.  Well,
technically, it wasn't bad.  Musically is was incredible.  I was riveted
throughout.  That kids could do this!  I never thought it possible.
Apparently, it is if you set the bar high enough.

I should have learned from my one year back in the late Sixties in a
remote rural school where I had a middle school band where none had existed
before.  (I may have written about this before.) At the beginning of the
year, they could barely play scales.  At the end of the year, they were
playing grade II, a substantial leap, and every note of it was classical
music.  (Bartok, Kabelevsky, Gould, Marcello, and others).  Best of all,
they liked it (much to my amazement).  Which was great, since I wasn't
going to bend on this issue.  Not one inch.  No pop music in my band.  And
it worked.  These kids astounded me the entire year and in rehearsals in
concerts (after some, shall we say, demonstrations of pique on my part).
The job that was formed that year was cut the next for budget reasons--and
I'm not sure I'd have returned to that setting anyway (I'm a city boy)--but
it was a year to remember, and perhaps one I did not learn from quickly
enough.

I realize now that the one thing I had in common with Zander back then was
that I set standards, had expectations, and stuck to them.  The kids did
the rest.  I've seen other well-raised kids recently, too.

So finally, I realize that kids can be better than I thought they could be.
Too late, of course.  But others don't have to make this mistake.  I really
believe most kids pick up the music they do where they can find it.  If
it's not from parents and the home, from teachers, from musicians, it's
going to be from somewhere, and that somewhere is too often the TV, the
street, the mall, and the record companies.  Unfortunately, too many
parents don't have music.  And too many schools don't either.  It's a
vicious circle.  How do you start something when there's no place to start?
Unless you start something.

But what do I know? I don't have kids.

Roger Hecht