The Day the Music Died
Discover the August 2025 Difficulty
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Spencer Kornhaber completely articulates the ersatz nature of popular culture right this moment. One thing I believe he missed about fashionable pop music, although, is the comparatively rare use of devices. The listener can really feel the emotion of a tune created utilizing precise devices. It’s the distinction between quick meals and a home-cooked meal. I believe this helps clarify the second nation music is having; take heed to nation, and also you’ll hear an actual guitar or violin. It makes me surprise if music can survive in any other case.
Andrew Brown
Wilmington, Del.
I used to be delighted to see my native radio station, KMUN, talked about in Spencer Kornhaber’s article. A community-supported station in a rural space of the Pacific Northwest, KMUN is itself an establishment combating towards the decline of fashionable tradition. The station has a small employees, and plenty of applications are offered by volunteers. There’s a lot of folks music, but every present has distinct music and artists. The identical is true of the station’s classical applications. A couple of exhibits often have musicians within the studio acting on air. Native residents talk about present occasions and points and may even suggest their very own applications to current, after taking a category in radio expertise.
Kornhaber’s article focuses on cultural conformity, and but right here’s good outdated KMUN doing radio with selection, goal, eccentricity, and group. I hope The Atlantic’s readers will give it a pay attention!
Laurie Caplan
Astoria, Ore.
I’m sincerely grateful to Spencer Kornhaber for speaking with Ted Gioia. I do know the headline of Kornhaber’s article calls to thoughts the yr 1971, however the nice fragmentation of our tradition dates even additional again. Early-Twentieth-century philosophers warned that the “mechanization of tradition” would undermine the which means and goal of life. ChatGPT and different AI applied sciences appear to be the end result of that development.
David Thomas
Rockville, Md.
As I reviewed the record of the artists talked about in Spencer Kornhaber’s article, I wasn’t stunned that so many individuals suppose modern music is in decline.
To these individuals I say: Cécile McLorin Salvant, Waxahatchee, Black Pumas, St. Paul & the Damaged Bones, boygenius and its particular person members, Lianne La Havas, Samara Pleasure, Moist Leg, Indigo Sparks, Joan Shelley, Lake Road Dive, Lucius, Sierra Ferrell, Dana Gavanski, Khruangbin, Leon Bridges (or Khruangbin and Leon Bridges), Bahamas, Amyl and the Sniffers, Nels Cline, I’m With Her, Rufus Wainwright, Laura Marling, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, and, and, and …
Anybody who thinks that the world isn’t awash in nice music is solely not wanting in the appropriate locations.
William Rogers
Washington, D.C.
Spencer Kornhaber replies:
William Rogers factors out a reassuring truth: When you search for it, you possibly can nonetheless discover most something you search in tradition—together with rock and folks musicians who faithfully adhere to Twentieth-century requirements for excellence. However I wish to push again towards the notion, embedded within the different letters, that sustaining cultural well being is generally a matter of preservation. We should always after all champion expert instrumentalists and scrappy radio stations, and we should always suppose critically about what’s gained and misplaced in each technological transition. It’s as necessary, and more durable, to nurture greatness that’s flourishing in new kinds, utilizing new methods. We’d like maximalist, forward-charging artwork that may compete with, not merely present refuge from, the attention-scrambling fashionable forces that may in any other case drive us right into a darkish age.
What Is Classical Music?
The time period is utilized to radically completely different compositions throughout greater than 1,000 years of historical past, Matthew Aucoin wrote within the Might subject. We’d like a greater definition.
In his article about what he calls “written music,” Matthew Aucoin rightly laments the shortcoming of cash-strapped public colleges to show musical literacy. Not so way back, city public colleges have been at occasions websites of world-class music schooling. Aucoin mentions Miles Davis in his article, so it’s price remembering that Davis typically heaped reward in interviews on his first trumpet instructor, Elwood Buchanan, who labored for the general public colleges of his hometown, East St. Louis, Illinois. It was Mr. Buchanan, Davis mentioned, who inspired him to play mild, quick, and with out vibrato—three issues that may quickly grow to be synonymous with the Miles Davis type. Elvin Jones, one of the vital influential drummers in jazz historical past, had solely a ninth-grade schooling however credited his musical growth to his middle-school music instructor in Pontiac, Michigan. In the meantime, in Chicago, a succession of jazz greats—Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, and Gene Ammons, to call just some—studied beneath the identical inspiring instructor, Walter Dyett, who ran the music program at DuSable Excessive Faculty. The same testimony seems within the biography of the legendary multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy.
This legacy of musical schooling reminds us of the facility of public colleges to nurture the subsequent era of expertise. As Aucoin suggests, ensuring these applications are totally funded right this moment is a stable funding in the way forward for written music on this nation.
Seth Kershner
Hadley, Mass.
Bravo to Matthew Aucoin for his splendidly insightful and enlightening article. I’m a specialist within the subject of musical notation, with the majority of my profession behind me. I used to be, as Aucoin places it, the “modern-day equal of medieval monks laboriously copying out illuminated manuscripts.” It’s true—I spent a number of years in apprenticeship beneath an expert copyist after which went on to arrange music for Broadway exhibits, movies, symphony orchestras, operas, nightclub acts, commercials. All with pen and ink.
Partially because of this, I believe it’s price writing an addendum to Aucoin’s proposed description of classical music. His article offers principally with music as an expression of the artist. I submit, nonetheless, that the necessity for music-notation literacy consists of the world of economic music, too. This is able to prolong the advantages of musical literacy past the live performance corridor and into most of the people; maybe it might even make faculty music applications extra related and fewer vulnerable to finances cuts. Simply as architects want development staff to appreciate their expressive ideas, composers and songwriters want arrangers, orchestrators, and copyists.
Robert Nowak
Tonawanda, N.Y.
As somebody who has no musical aptitude however appreciates those that do, I loved Matthew Aucoin’s “What Is Classical Music?” However I’ve to disagree along with his assertion that “the written phrase is as prevalent right this moment because it ever was.”
Northwestern’s Medill Faculty reviews that previously 20 years, the US has misplaced greater than one-third of its print newspapers. As a former president of my native library’s board of trustees, I noticed CDs, DVDs, paintings, and maker areas take over ground areas that beforehand had been full of books.
For a lot of, the rise in time spent on social media and watching streaming leisure correlates with a decline in time spent studying. Aucoin rightfully needs that we People would spend extra time listening. However we additionally must spend extra time studying.
Jay Fisher
Lisle, In poor health.
Behind the Cowl
This subject contains a assortment of tales marking 80 years of life within the Atomic Age. Amongst these are Ross Andersen’s reporting from South Korea and Japan, two international locations which will pursue nuclear weapons; Tom Nichols’s evaluation of America’s system of command and management; and Noah Hawley’s essay on Kurt Vonnegut and the bomb. For our cowl picture, we chosen {a photograph} of a 1954 bomb check at Bikini Atoll. The picture was present in a authorities archive by the photographer Michael Gentle. The so-called Yankee check launched an explosive yield equal to 13.5 million tons of TNT, about 900 occasions that of Little Boy.
— Lucy Murray Willis, Photograph Editor
This text seems within the August 2025 print version with the headline “The Commons.”
