Does Classical Music discourage young Musicians? Over the past month, I finished reading “Class, Control, and Classical Music” by Anna Bull. It’s an ethnography of young musicians in England, participating in youth orchestras and youth choirs. It’s a damning work which doesn’t shy away from the impacts of classical music on young people — for […]
Last Saturday, I was blessed with a free ticket at the Canberra Theatre Centre. I was umming and ahhing about going to this production: tickets for under 30s were $60, plus a fee which brought it up to almost $70. I had never seen this opera before, but I thought the tickets were quite steep […]
Something I’ve been developing in Indonesia is a concept of how music evolves. We’re all familiar with the biological concept of evolution: organisms have random traits introduced into generations, and the traits which stick end up becoming more and more common, resulting in a species that is more successful in its environment. The story I […]
This week, I’ve been playing around with ideas of modernity. This is partly inspired by Arjun Appadurai, who’s seminal text Modernity at Large I’ve been studying for my PhD. In it, Appadurai argues that modernity is not a simple transition but an in-flux set of scapes that influence modernity. For example, rather than a country […]