1st International Congress of Musicology

Athens Goethe Institute, 25-27 February 2002

Paper Abstracts

Evangelos Moutsopoulos

Music as a Cultural Factor of Social Life, Today

This paper observes the origins of musical art as a means of communication, since humanity’s earliest stages. Music’s elevation to a serious issue of human conscience, in antiquity, is juxtaposed to instances of today’s commercialised societies’ cultural experience. The overpowering pressure of economic factors tends, through suitable advertising of the Media, to revert the old dogma of industrial aesthetics (“the ugly does not sell well”). Within the worldwide economic spirit of “universalization”, individual evaluations of an artwork are legalized, demonstrating each individual’s idea of a personal cultural dignity.

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