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On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate.

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.

Our modern society - especially in the West, and especially now - reveres youth.

When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.

The whole world has changed much since the '80's. In the united States, rap music and country music dominate radio and that certainly wasn't the case in the early '80's.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.