Diminuendo: today, "diva" means Britney Spears, and you'd have a tough time finding many high-school kids who know Mahler from Mantovani. Brooks Peters looks at the steady erosion of music education in America.

When American author Eudora Welty died, earlier this year, I went back and reread her short story "June Recital." It's one of her most haunting and evocative works, depicting life in Morgana, a small, fictional Mississippi town in the 1920s, in the days before film and radio irrevocably altered the cultural landscape. In it, a lonely spinster, Miss Eckhart, gives music lessons to the children in the area. The spring concert is the community's yearly rite of passage, a celebration as vital to the town's sense of itself as Independence Day or Thanksgiving. Welty's tale is a portrait of America's far-away past, when learning music was still a vital part of our everyday ...