continued…

Why, to this day, does American Culture still hold such an endearing picture of the Summer of Love and it’s worthless, drugged out, cast of spineless little sub-human creatures called hippies? You can see it in the media at least once a week if not more. Some dapper, conservative looking news anchor with his three-piece Brooks Brothers suit, well-trimmed hair and proper grammar starts off a story with a reference to the “idealism of the sixties”. Several hit TV sitcoms have cute, funny characters that are clearly hippie culture identities. Woodstock is constantly referred to as the most important event of 1969, if not the century, if not all of human history (man went to the moon for the first time in 1969, by the way, remember that?). I can still remember, as a child, hearing hippies and their supporters complaining that instead of sending astronauts to the moon “we” (as in anyone with a job and money to be taxed away, which of course, didn’t include any hippies) should be feeding the poor and cleaning up the ghettos. I suppose that if you feed your mind enough narcotic substances scientific achievement must lose its luster.

In the Classical/Romantic Era, musical rebels, revolutionaries and actual innovators pushed music FURTHER along. They made music better. They made it more complex, involving and most importantly, they staked out, invented and established new ways of expressing thoughts and emotions. This is, for anyone interested, the primary reason that classical music is the best music invented thus far: It is capable of expressing the widest and most powerful (and subtle) range of thoughts and emotions. In the Jazz Era (1900-1950) musicians played ever more raucously, and with more intensity. Many older people viewed this as simply chaotic noise but it is a fact that these musicians were very technically accomplished, they worked hard at their craft and most of them had a solid understanding of exactly what they were doing with music.