Talking to ourselves

In today's New York Times Book Review there's a review of a book on ancient Greece -- Thomas Cahill's Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. I was interested; if Cahill could tell us why we should pay attention to ancient Greece today, maybe we could learn something about why classical music matters, too. Not that I'm consigning classical music to the distant antiquity of Homer and Euripides, but the parallel (partial, not complete) ought to be obvious.

When I got to the end of the review (by Joy Connolly, "who teaches classics and political theory at Stanford University," says her blurb) I was both sad and not surprised to learn that Cahill -- at least in Connolly's opinion -- hadn't done his job. "Cahill's book," Connolly writes, "is a rich, lively presentation of why the Greeks matter to those who already believe they do."

I wasn't surprised because much the same thing often happens when people explain why classical music matters. "It's beautiful," someone e-mailed not long after I began this blog. Someone else wanted to tell me why classical music is better than pop, and said, with genuine feeling, that nothing could compare to the Magic Fire music at the end of Die Walküre. I respect the emotion behind that, but if you already agree with the statement -- which you might not, simply because you like Bach better than Wagner -- then you won't be convinced.

I've especially seen people fall into this trap when they lament the decline of classical music on public radio. For instance:

[C]lassical music is public radio's birthright in New York and shouldn't be easy to abandon. Every community in the country, not just New York, deserves a station seriously dedicated to serious music, because that music is partly how we have defined what we want to share and preserve as a culture. The job of providing this service ultimately falls to public radio because few commercial stations are willing to do it.

Who's the "we," who've defined what should be shared and preserved? Evidently it's those of us who like classical music.

Or this:

Who knows how many of the uninitiated would discover the greatest music ever written if it were broadcast during a station's peak listening hours?

But who says it's the greatest music ever written? The people who love it. (And, to go a little deeper, not all music is written down. Think of jazz, or classical music from India. So the statement I've quoted makes a careless but revealing slip -- it takes classical music as the norm, and uses "written" as the word to describe how all music is created.)

We have to do better. If we're going to defend classical music, we have to explain why it ought to matter to people who don't yet like it -- and even to people who may never like it, but might benefit from having it around (the way we all benefit from bridges, let's say, that we ourselves don't cross, because they're crossed by people we need to see, and do business with).