A year or so I was riffling through the CD racks at the Public Library - I usually limit myself to classical music CDs these day - when my fell upon an CD cover with the photo of an atypically beautiful woman, i.e., no manufactured beauty a la JLo or Britney Spears, on a stool singing in one of those MTV Unplugged sessions. So I checked the CD out, and for a few nights gave my ears to the highly enigmantic voice of Ms. Merchant.

Since I am rooting around YouTube (it is addictive!) after a difficult morning, I present to you another bauble: Merchant's cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Because The Night". Watch out for the orchestra!

Today at noon, I saw an ad for a free performance of Eliot Fisk with the Vega String Quartet. So I had classical music for lunch - the best piece was a Guitar Quartet of Haydn's.

Other images here: buoy.antville.org

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.