Indoctrinating the young

[mtbc]

Last night at Perth Theatre we all went to see some rather good singers from Scottish Opera. It was nice that they hung around in the foyer after the performance to speak to the audience as we departed. It seemed to me that among our children we may have had the evening's youngest attendees. Thinking back to my own childhood, I watched a lot of opera because my parents liked it and back in those days we all gathered around the same television. Many families these days live rather more separately, buried in their tablets and headphones and streaming video on demand. I wonder if this change inhibits the transmission of familiarity with less-accessible works from one generation to the next or if even back when I was young it was mostly old people enjoying classical music.