As time goes by, what people do in their liesure time changes. In today's society of the high impact images of television and computer technology, auditory skills have fallen out of fashion. They once enjoyed a much higher level of asthetic (appreciation through the senses) importance.
In the not so distant past, people's lives where limited by their geographic location as traveling even moderate distances meant that you had to go by horse. That required you to travel at much slower speeds than what we are capable of today and also meant that you had to allow time for your horse to rest and sit out bad weather. Today we think nothing of jumping in a car and driving to another city only an hours drive away. That same trip in any previous century would have meant at least a whole day of travel, probably two with a stop at an inn along the way.
Entertainment was not anything like it is today. If we want to hear some music we have several options: we can turn on the radio, pop a CD or tape into the stereo, tune into Muchmusic or even tune into a live broadcast via the Internet. In past centuries the only option was to have it recreated by a living person be it yourself or by attending a concert of some type. Visual images where only static in the form of paintings which means that the only really dynamic form of entertainment was music (not including athletic activities for the moment).
The result of this was that people had developed the ability to listen to music with a critical ear. They delighted in hearing and understanding what a composer had written. This has become a lost art of sorts with today's heavy emphasis on visual imagery.