If music, and dancing, serve to draw groups together and direct their emotions towards some common external goal, as E.O. Wilson points out – hip hop or rap, one of the most popular styles of current music, serves this purpose via a public display of anger, alienation and aggression.

Classical music, by drawing up the bridge of cash and hyper refined black tie snobbery, has put itself out of circulation for most of the younger generation. Besides since a significant part of this music originally served a religious function – in notable cases like J.S. Bach’s, it was almost exclusively music written for Church services – it serves none of the needs of Gen X, Y or Z, for whom religion is an old fogeyish superstition at best or a crutch from which one frees oneself at worst.

If the depiction of Mozart in the film ‘Amadeus’ is reasonably accurate, it is hard to imagine in the current time, that opera was once enjoyed (and was even accessible!) by (to) the common man.

The death of coherent communities leads to the death of aesthetic in music. For example rural black communities in America were joined together through the exercise of gospel music, to express suffering under oppression and sing of man’s yearning for redemption. Blues served the same function in the secular arena. Now we have rap and other forms of angry music taking their place. I find both these forms of music to be beautiful, and that they can be heard at an angle of repose, unlike the current avatar of music originating in the black experience – hip-hop.