Skepticlawyer

2 Comments

1. Jacques Chester
   Posted June 27, 2008 at 10:34 am | Permalink

   I listen to Sir Humphrey and these days I hear Kevin Rudd.

2. TimT
   Posted June 29, 2008 at 8:33 am | Permalink

   This reminds me of a Shaw quotation I’ve just encountered.

   I’m reading G B Shaw’s ‘Music In London’ at the moment, the very entertaining weekly music reviews he wrote in the 1890s and early 1900s. Mostly it consists of very entertaining, good-humoured mockery of bad musicians, and good-humoured praise of good musicians. But Shaw also occasionally slips in a little Fabian polemic, like the bit where he argues for a publicly subsidised band, on the grounds that such public ventures into the arts makes life better, even for people who are not interested in the arts (but, of course, have to pay for it anyway.)…

   “Though not because private enterprise has been behindhand in the matter. On the contrary, it is because private enterprise every Sunday sends a processing, religious or Radical, past my windows every five minutes or so, each headed by a band, that I feel the need for some model of excellence to hold up to these enthusiastic instrumentalists.”

   One wonders what he’d make of the situation in 21st century Australia, where public funding of classical music has risen, and its popularity amongst the listening public has fallen, almost in inverse proportion to one another. We live in the sort of world that Shaw wanted, but would Shaw want to live in this sort of world himself?