And before all the anti-elitists check in, reminding me of the value of popular music, here's an exchange between conductor Daniel Barenboim and composer James McMillan during Barenboim's BBC Reith lectures. These are similar to the Massey lectures; Barenboim's theme was "Hearing - the neglected sense." You will see that Barenboim was left "gobsmacked" as we say in England, by the power of the following quote.
JAMES McMILLAN: Hello my name is James McMillan, I'm another composer. Recently the English musicologist Julian Johnson produced a fascinating book called Who Needs Classical Music? He implies that serious music has suffered in the face of the apparent triumph of the visual and the verbal, but also of what he would see as the banal and even the populist. And therefore my question is this -
"What is it about serious music that baffles and indeed in some cases offends the advocates of an ever increasingly ubiquitous, narrow, some might say debased popular culture? Is it its very ability to rise from the mundane? Is it the suggestion that there may be such a thing as a secret inner life which cannot be reduced to a rigorously enforced commonality, that there may be no such thing indeed as a closed universe?"
DANIEL BARENBOIM:
Wow!
CBC Radio - everywhere music takes you - except to a secret inner life
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