TEXT C Material culture refers to
the touchable, material "things"--physical objects that can be seen, held, felt,
used--that a culture produces. Examining a culture’s tools and technology can
tell us about the group’s history and way of life. Similarly, research into the
material culture of music can help us to understand the music-culture. The most
vivid body of "things" in it, of course, are musical instruments. We cannot hear
for ourselves the actual sound of any musical performance before the 1870s when
the phonograph (留声机) was invented, so we rely on instruments for important
information about music-cultures in the remote past and their development. Here
we have two kinds of evidence: instruments well preserved and instruments
pictured in art. Through the study of instruments, as well as paintings, written
documents, and so on, we can explore the movement of music from the Near East to
China over a thousand years ago, or we can outline the spread of Near Eastern
influence to Europe that resulted in the development of most of the instruments
in the symphony orchestra. Sheet music or printed music, too, is
material culture. Scholars once defined folk music-cultures as those in which
people learn and sing music by ear rather than from print, but research shows
mutual influence among oral and written sources during the past few centuries in
Europe, Britain, and America. Printed versions limit variety because they tend
to standardize any song, yet they stimulate people to create new and different
songs. Besides, the ability to read music notation (乐谱) has a far-reaching
effect on musicians and, when it becomes widespread, on the music-culture as a
whole. One more important part of music’s material culture
should be singled out: the influence of the electronic media--radio, record
player, tape recorder, television, and videocassette recorder, with the future
promising talking and singing computers and other developments. This is all part
of the "information revolution’’, a twentieth century phenomenon as important as
the industrial revolution was in the nineteenth. These electronic media are not
just limited to modern nations, they have affected music-cultures all over the
globe. Which of the following best summarizes the main idea of the passage
A．Musical instruments developed through the years will sooner or later be replaced by computers. B．Music cannot be passed on to future generations unless it is recorded. C．Folk songs cannot be spread far unless they are printed on music sheets. D．Tile development of music culture is highly dependent on its material aspect.