Omnibus: Leonard Bernstein

This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn an income, if at all.

> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.

Who said anything about choosing an _arbitrary_ point in the past? What the author tries to do here is to make the past arbitrary, not interesting, perhaps less relevant than it ought to be. But that's not the problem.

The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place. In what percent of schools is music history taught in any serious manner by a serious instructor? I honestly am fundamentally perplexed by this article because I would expect first it would establish that music history should be taught in schools at all. Then the author could get into implementation specifics.

But the United States hasn't been interested in music history since Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus[0] lectures aired in the 50s, if it was even then. Today, "Classical Music" isn't for old people anymore, it's for keeping vagrants away from your property[1].

So what the author is really attacking here is the past, because more than ever the past has been deemed too boring on a massive cultural scale. This is just one example of people attempting to make palatable "the past" or whatever else is now too boring, too nerdy or too impossible for regular people to approach.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-moza...