It is no wonder that man himself has come to create his own music that is capable of passionately effecting his most inner feelings of tranquility and sometimes even stirring his innermost ardent desire for some physically expressed passion. Music is no doubt one of the earliest forms of entertainment and while it has the capacity to incite passion under some circumstances it is just as effective as a temperate opiate to a disrupted individual. Entertainment has been expanded beyond the realm of sound and has inculcated what might be referred to as the visual arts. Mankind has an equally long history with depicting his state of mind with visual imagery. It is obvious that his first intentions were to communicate something about his life and later his expressed images evolved into an esthetic expression of ideas and feelings.
Art can often have the same hypnotic effect on our range of moods as any other opiate.
Shakespeare certainly added a common touch to the stage performance and our classic musicians gave the theater another grand expression by combining words and music to create another form staged performance, the opera. Modern technology had now mass-produced these audiovisual performances first off on the large silver screen and later miraculously brought these grand performances over the airways into everybody's home with the awesome invention of television. Now that magical glass tube has hypnotically seduced many of us and most certainly too many of our children into a state of mindless oblivion. What a powerful opiate that this television has become to have so entranced and captivated so much of our attention and for so much of our valued and unrestrained time. I t is the best of businesses and the worst of businesses.