Editorial: Small Country, Think Big
Toner Quinn
The third annual festival of the Institute of Ideas in London – The Battle of Ideas – took place in October. There was a music element this year, which I attended, comprising four separate discussions on music education, the ubiquity of music, the universality of music, and music and social change. All potentially interesting, but what was most striking was the limited terms of reference. In such a culturally diverse city as London (leaving aside the wealth of musical traditions all over England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), it was strange in the twenty-first century to hear a serious discussion on the status of music in British society that was so tied to Western classical music of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
This self-imposed straitjacket...
