I have had problems with my ISP and was offline for a month, so
I'm catching up on emails.  The conversation "Mechanical Music For
Teenagers" caught my eye, and now I'm going to try and restrain myself
or I could be pretty voluminous in addressing this.

Matthew Caulfield mentioned that the younger folks don't respond to
songs like "God Bless America" and "William Tell Overture" they way
"geezers" (his term) do.  I beg to remind him that these songs both
have a significant pop culture reference to those folks old enough
to remember Kate Smith and "The Lone Ranger".

Pop culture references rarely cross generation lines, a phenomenon
I am constantly aware of when talking with my priest, who is all of 25.
When the two of us converse and either of us makes a reference to
something in popular culture, more often than not, looks of
bewilderment result.

Matthew also wondered why (to paraphrase) they don't write enduring
songs today like Tin Pan Alley did.  I hasten to remind him that the
Tin Pan Alley stuff from the teens, twenties and thirties was written
for, essentially, young folk.  If you take a look at a roll catalog of
pop tunes from, say, 1925, sure, you'll find all the 'standards" of
that period that you'd expect, but (and here's the kicker) these were
the new hit songs!  Also in the catalog were sentimental ballads,
marches, schottisches and tons of stuff for mom and dad, gramps and
granny and so forth.

Then if you look at a roll or record catalog from, say, 1945, you'll
find a goodly chunk of twenties tunes, not as many of the pre-twenties
titles (since folks who remembered this stuff would be dying off), and
a bunch of stuff that was _very_ current at the time, and has by now
been forgotten, as well as "all the familiar tunes" that one associates
with that period.  Then by 1965, most if not all of the pre-twenties
stuff will be gone, there'll be a smattering of twenties tunes, and a
fair amount of 40s tunes, but not _nearly_ as many twenty years earlier.

And so it goes.  As generations die off, so does their culture.
Historians make valiant efforts to record and preserve for future
generations the artifacts of preceding generations, but as those who
actually are part of that culture leave us, the cultural references
that give the period's music real significance are almost always lost.

There will be a time when the music of James P. Johnson, Paul Whiteman,
Isham Jones and the rest will be little more than an artifact, in fact
that time is very rapidly approaching.  The percentage of the population
for whom this music was a part of the everyday life of everyone around
them is diminishing daily and will soon reach zero.

But, the thing is, there _is_ mechanical music out there for teenagers!
Not everything that teens listen to is either rap or techno/trance
"dance music".  There's a good bit of melodic stuff to be found in
whatever's coming down the pike in terms of animated movies, which seem
to be the latest evolution of the Broadway musical.

A lot of this stuff has been cut into rolls by QRS, and is pretty darn
good.  We now have a generation of kids who have grown up with the
Warner Bros. cartoon show "The Animanics", and George Bogatko's
wondrous roll of the title song is certainly something most teens would
recognize.  I haven't watched Saturday morning cartoons for years, but
I suspect that they are a source of a number of tunes adaptable to the
mechanical music format, and video games are another source as well.  I
heard on National Public Radio that there is a very popular CD out
there of theme music from video games, and much of it that they played
was quite tuneful.

Bryan Cather, 39 years old
("On the cusp of geezerhood," I tell my teen friends who ask)
http://www.thepianoworld.com/