Peter Varley wrote:

>Bob Draper wrote:
>
>>In my secondary modern we learned no music and no languages.
>
>It's a disgrace that your school didn't teach any languages, but IMO not
>teaching music (or anything else which depends so much on personal taste)
>is no bad thing.  I'm very uncomfortable about the idea of state-owned
>schools teaching people to say they like state-approved music, just as I'm
>uncomfortable about state-owned schools teaching politics classes which
>encourage support of the Government Party. ...
>
>This comes back to the state-approved music.  I don't know what's on
>today's A-level syllabus, but about ten years ago, some of Penderecki's
>avant-garde stuff was on it.  Anyone who admitted to not liking it didn't
>pass the exam (and probably wouldn't have been allowed to sit it in the
>first place).  This was twenty years _after_ Penderecki himself had stopped
>producing avant-garde stuff and gone back to writing symphonies.

I recall Peter Ustinov writing that, as a schoolboy, he was marked "wrong"
for identifying a different composer from the preferred one as the greatest
composer in the world.  (I no longer recall which they were; possibly
Beethoven, Mozart and Bach.) This is of course the way classical music
should *not* be taught.  I see nothing wrong, however, w/ pupils and
students being exposed to a (preferably wide) selection of classical
compositions and being required to recognize them, even if they don't like
them.  It doesn't seem to me to be different from literature or painting.
It's all part of the culture in which they are growing up or at least in
which people used to grow up.  Yes, the selection will reflect the bias of
the selector, a problem that also exists when affording exposure to works
of literature and other forms of art.  In an ideal system, some self
selectivity can be encouraged by making libraries, the contents of which
are unlikely to be exhausted by any one student, available.

Walter Meyer