Music has rarely exerted such positively hypnotic fascination on such masses of listeners as it has since the meteoric rise of the English group, the Beatles, at the begining of the 1960s. Under this influence the leisure behaviour of young people began to undergo lasting change, focusing around music to an extent that no one — despite the periodically recurring waves of enthusiasm for specific vogues within dance music — would have thought possible. Young people in their thousands took up music making as a leisure activity once again, to say nothing of the masses that a single rock concert was capable of mobilising. At the same time, music has become a sociopolitical problem on a scale never seen before, concerning teachers, sociologists and psychologists equally — and it has become so in both capitalist and socialist societies, even though with quite different emphases. Evidently, then, for a whole age group with a lower age limit of about twelve (and steadily falling) and an upper limit of between twenty and twenty-five (when family responsibilities intrude — see Dollase, Riisenberg and Stollenwerk 1978), the process of attainment of selfhood within society is being realised, essentially, with reference to the assimilation of this kind of music.

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