This just occured to me. Classical music purists insist that classical music is valuable precisely because it isn’t popular.
Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You define classical music as not popular, and its look and feel starts to reflect that. People — no fools they — start to get the message, and classical music actually becomes unpopular. People stop listening to it.
And so the purists get their wish, though not quite in the way they expected. They hadn’t figured that if classical music wasn’t popular, it might disappear.
Recent Comments
Greg Sandow on The Monday post
Louis, you're entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts. Museums of contemporary art routinely exhibit realist work,...Greg Sandow on …for…
No need for an audience to be homogenous. I worked with the Pittsburgh Symphony on a concert series that was...Jeffrey Sultanof on The Monday post
Greg, Not only didn't the audiences like new music, but the critics.....It is fascinating to read their reactions to now-classic works...Louis Torres on The Monday post
The term "new" requires clarification. With regard to music, it had an entirely different meaning in 1860 than it does...bgn on …for…
" But if S4M did draw a NY-based event audience, would there be two not wholly compatible groups at the...