Don Satz wrote:

>1.  Having their own music - this abstract "ownership" factor is very
>significant.  It creates a common bond among young persons.
>
>2.  Peer Pressure - Although young persons like to give off the appearance
>of being independent and rebellious, I've always noticed that they really
>are strong on conforming with what other young persons are thinking and
>doing.

This correlates well with my personal experience.  In high school, I was
completely uninterested in what my "peers" liked or didn't like, and as
a band musician I was too deeply into making music to care about what
non-musicians liked, anyway.  Also, this was the late Bronze Age, or
thereabouts--at any rate, before adolescent generations identified
themselves so strongly with a particular musical style.

>3.  Young persons have high energy and relatively low attention spans.
>Those characteristics do not lend themselves to serious music which lasts
>substantially longer than a typical rock song.

This I'm not so sure about.  High energy does not prevent one from enjoying
CM--quite the opposite, it seems to me.  If you're into it enough, nothing
can give you as much of a charge as a Bach fugue, a Beethoven or Mahler
symphony, or whatever you will.  And there is no biological reason as
far as I know for assuming that adolescents can't have sufficiently long
attention spans (certainly today's kids can pay attention to video games
for quite long stretches, and they can easily sit entranced through a
2-hour teen flick that bores me to distraction).  It's basically a matter
of being interested in something enough to see it through to the end, I
think.  So not being interested in CM is the cause of a short attention
span to CM, rather than the reverse, I think.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]