Oh Dear

Weblogger Kelly Sedinger of Byzantium's Shores didn't much appreciate this barb of mine (and I'm certain he's not alone):

This may be the most clueless thing ACD has ever posted. Rather than actually address the suggestion that Greg Sandow is making, he instead goes for the cheap-shot insult.

[...]

[ACD] decides to make fun of the Entertainment Weekly readership, as if Sandow is suggesting that classical music needs to appeal to that crowd or some such thing.

[...]

As near as I can tell, ACD simply skimmed Sandow's post, saw the words "Entertainment Weekly", and fired off his post without devoting one more second of thought to it than that.

Oh dear.

I in fact singled out that specific remark of Greg Sandow's for skewering because it's both typical and emblematic of the gone-berserk equalitarianism that animates Mr. Sandow's and his kind's solution to the getting-a-wider-audience problem they see facing classical music today; a solution that embraces the thinking that a new audience for classical music can be created from the ignorant masses if only classical music would adopt the methods and techniques of popular culture to make classical music easier to understand and more inviting for them.

Quite apart from the sheer lunacy of that sort of thinking, at its bottom lurks the even more lunatic notion that classical music's present core audience is essentially no different in cultural substance and native proclivities than the core audience for, say, rock music, or C&W, or you-name-the-pop-music-genre, and, worse, that classical music itself is not inherently of any more value and worth than the music of any pop genre; a notion not only lunatic, but perfectly idiot.

Were it merely that the thinking and its at-bottom notion were lunatic there would be little problem. Lunatic thinking and ideas have always been legion. The problem arises when the Greg Sandows of this world agitate for, and become activists in putting that lunatic thinking into actual practice. Witness, for exemplary instance, the Concert Companion as it was conceived, and as it's being implemented today (this prior post of mine suggests an actual beneficial use to which the device could be put).

Were the thinking of Mr. Sandow and his like-minded colleagues and sympathizers in this matter to gain real currency to any meaningful degree in our culture, it would serve only to blunt and blur essential and inherent aesthetic distinctions and sensibilities, and diminish and cheapen that which is unique to, and distinguishing in both the classical and pop realms.

But, then, the destruction of all hierarchies, both natural and culturally determined, is the real aim of all levelers, is it not.