With Friends Like This, Enemies Are A Redundancy

That great friend and supporter of classical music, ardent populist, music journalist, and wannabe author Greg Sandow is at it yet once again:

The classical music world is trying to figure out its relationship to the rest of the world. The rest of the world listens to pop (and jazz, and country, and hiphop, and dance music, and world music, and Latin music, and lots more). We live, as far as they’re all concerned, in a closed little box. We need to show them we’re human, too, and that we live in the same world they do. And that many of us listen to their music, which — because we live in the same world — is our music, too.

A more wrongheaded, even imbecile, statement is difficult to imagine. "We need to show them we’re human, too"? Why, for Christ's sake, do we need to show them anything whatsoever? The very idea is perfectly absurd.

And, "[M]any of us listen to their music, which — because we live in the same world — is our music, too"? Excuse me? Many of us who are devoted to classical music "live in the same world" as the airheads, and consider "their music ... is our music, too"? Well, some of us clearly do, but I suggest to Mr. Sandow that in future he limit himself to speaking for himself and his postmodern-sixties-sensibility fellows alone, and not for the classical music community at large who no more consider the music of the backward-baseball-cap crowd "their music" than they consider ours theirs.

(For a more reasoned and sober argument contra Mr. Sandow's notions, see this post by James Reel of KUAT-FM Blog.)