You are an ass, sir. You made it clear from the beginning that you prefer Michael Jackson to the Proms, so why should anyone listen to anything you have to say? Your analysis, while facile, does have some merit: Yes, there have been changes in the culture which have led to the decline in interest in art music, generally, and this includes Jazz, by the way, which is as rarified for younger audiences as a motet by Guillaume de Machaut. But what you have failed to take into consideration is the extent to which music education has diminished, both in the UK and in the States. As a famous Jazz musician once pointed out, one gets from music what one puts into it. Pop has become the soundtrack for the lives of younger people and it wouldn't matter if a classical composer wrote a good triadic ally based tune or not. There has been a decision made in those places where such decisions have clout that art music and art generally are no longer important. It has little to do with style, and in fact, younger people who listen to what is called classical music much prefer atonal music to "a good tune'. But it is clear that you came into the discussion with an axe to grind, so grind away. It will avail you nothing, as you are about as musically uninformed as the first auditors of Stravinsky's Le Sacre.

Beneath the surface gloss of Christianity the skeletal architecture of human decency and compassion for all living things gives Christianity and any faith a validity that inspires all great emotions, and music, more than many of the other arts captures this inspiration quite well. The secularities of necessity and full desires have always existed within civilization but of these later years the open horrors of unleashed greed and cruelty and total disdain for the values of the basic human being as expressed by the vicious moralities of the corporate-military-financial complex have totally trashed any expectations for the future of mankind or, indeed, life itself on the planet. The death of music is perhaps a symptom of the final vileness of the species and all its possible hopes.

You need to work on your prose style, it could use a bit of improvement.

Thank you for the hope attendant to your well written article. There will again be harmony, counterpoint, "chili con carne, sparkling champagne" and it will be ruled with a rod of iron in the coming kingdom "where the soul of man never dies' However, in the literal 'meantime', if at all possible, "let there be love" in the understanding of how in the fullness of our times it is necessary, first, that thug life run its course. The best news? "Nothing can change the shape of things to come"

My good friend, an ex-army doctor and a well-traveled man – and also a very liberal Sikh (an oxymoron perhaps) – once told me that of the many places he had visited, none impressed and inspired him more than Italy as here was a country, he said, where the fusion of Art, Religion & Life was more apparent than anywhere else he had been. To him, the whole country was a veritable living museum and the religious aspect palpable. (Perhaps he meant the Italy of old where church going was the normal thing to do every Sunday and feast day as it is a fact now, that most Italians are nominal Catholics only and churches in Italy, like elsewhere in Europe are almost empty, in obeisance to the secular zeitgeist! But I think it had to with the ubiquity of churches & cathedrals there.) He said that although China where he had been before, is a country of high material accomplishments, the spiritual aspect was conspicuously missing and India (where his forefathers came from and where he had spent years studying in a medical college there) was its antithesis: he found great piety there but also general indifference to the material world. Italy, or the Italy of yore, to him, was the embodiment of the good life: its demonstrative folks know how to enjoy fully the fruits of the earth but not at the expense of the spiritual, both manifested in their sensuous enjoyment of 'wein, weib und gesang' and the many religiously-inspired artistic creations, at any rate those of the past eg. Renaissance. He began to cultivate a love for their gastronomic delights and beyond, in particular, the great works of painting, sculpture and architecture. Names like Michelangelo, Raphael, da Vinci, Donatello, Titian, Brunelleschi, Palladio et.al poured from his mouth like olive oil from the stone mills of a farm in Puglia. But no sooner he told me the full extent of his predilections relating to the aesthetic creations of the West than I said to him that there was a missing link. He had not heard of Gregorian plainchant, Palestrina, Pergolesi, Vivaldi, Rossini, Verdi, Puccini and such. Though he knew the names of Mozart and Beethoven, of their music he had very little acquaintance beyond the opening “Fate knocking on your door” four notes of the latter's Fifth symphony. His love for music began and ended with Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley. At once I thought I had a duty to perform here, not that I was so presumptuous as to put myself in the role of 'savior of great music' but I just thought that he might find something new and different in the realm of so called 'serious music' and go on to develop an interest in it if the right notes were hit, so to speak, but before that can happen, he required an introduction. At that time I was a tenor in an amateur choral society here in KL and it so happened that we were about to stage Mascagni's opera verismo, Cavelleria Rusticana, with its combination of the themes of Sin & Sanctity (two sides of the same religious coin?) which only the Italians are best at. And here is an opera replete with beautiful arias & choruses and gorgeous orchestral music plus quite violent moments, albeit staged, which I was certain would bowled over Dr. Singh. (It did.) I gave him a complimentary ticket and he enjoyed himself. Sadly, he never got the full impact of the music as in lieu of an orchestra we had a pianist who turned out to be from Yorkshire, at that time he was working in KL. Incidentally, this choir I was in had quite a few expats, living in KL, and there was this red-haired soprano from Wales (married to a Londoner) whose voice was divine. Hardly surprising, as where else in Britain would you find the Eisteddfod?