Rachel Halliburton is deputy editor of Time Out (London).

Why doesn’t listening to modern classical music matter any more?

Like every art form, music should continue to provoke and explore different ways of getting under our skin, but though I would hate to have a world without dissonance, I believe that rock music stole classical music’s thunder when it took over the role of providing society’s songs and dances, not least by absorbing the power of electricity to provide the level of energy that an increasingly sex and technology obsessed society needed.

Music for life

How can music help improve young people’s lives? I suppose unlike the Music Manifesto I firmly believe that the answer comes as much in the discipline it instils as in the flights of creative self-expression it can let loose.