Exalting musical illiteracy
published: Tuesday | August 26, 2003

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I MUST commend Dawn Ritch for her splendid column "Reggae, Violence and Cultural Decline" (The Sunday Gleaner, August 3, 2003).

Sadly, we have a jaundiced view of classical music and appear quite unruffled that our national School of Music has deteriorated into structural and academic squalor. We squander money wantonly and feebly accept that the arts will always be bottom of the list of political benefaction.

The ancient Greeks placed greater emphasis on music education than mathematics and the Doctrine of Ethos held in the conviction that music powerfully affected character and behaviour and that different kinds of music affect it in different ways.

We, however, tacitly accept the scandalous absence of decent music education in our children's curriculum but we fervently exalt musical illiterates and woefully regret our villainous image: Jamaica, doomed forever as a brutal nation with violent and disorderly Philistines.

May God help us!

I am, etc.,

SIMON WELLS

P.O. Box 2859

Kingston 8

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