Confessions Of An Apparent Reactionary Middle-Brow Bourgeois

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 8:10 PM Eastern on 15 Dec to restore a missing parenthetical in the last graf.]

I sat myself down a few days ago to give myself a good talking to. "With each passing day, ACD, you're beginning to appear more and more like a reactionary middle-brow bourgeois where it concerns the domain of classical music," I admonished myself. "More and more you come down on the side polarly opposite the certified smart set in classical music — i.e., the professional practitioners and print-published classical music critics — and, to be perfectly blunt about it, you're beginning to piss me off. Wake up and smell the proverbial coffee! Get a grip! You're fast beginning to appear a champion of the flat-earthers where classical music is concerned!"

I confess I had to agree with my Admonishing Self. But things are even more dire than my Admonishing Self imagined. I daily find myself more and more beginning to feel resentment against and contempt for the certified classical music smart set; to feel they're doing the domain of classical music not only a disservice but real harm in their appreciation and championing of postmodern idiocies such as the idiocies of the avant-garde that include the embracing of Cagean and Stockhausen-esque and Minimalist (uppercase M) aesthetics; idiocies such as the falsifications and absurdities of Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater (Regieoper); idiocies such as the denial of and the declaring null and void the by-their-very-nature-generated boundary line between classical and pop musics; idiocies such as the idea of effectively transforming the classical music concert hall into a quasi-mosh pit on the grounds that it will free the audience to experience and enjoy the music more fully and will, in addition, bring into the concert hall a new and younger audience; etc., etc., etc.

Well, it seems there's no help for me. That all the above makes me appear a reactionary middle-brow bourgeois where the domain of classical music is concerned is undeniable and I must accept that as there's nothing for it until such time — if ever such time arrives, as improbable as that may be — as I can honestly appreciate and champion what the current certified classical music smart set now appreciates and champions. Until that time what I must earnestly strive to do is find an honorable and honest way to not feel resentment against and contempt for the current certified classical music smart set. After all, I've no reason to suspect that smart set of being dishonorable or dishonest in their enthusiasms (other than, perhaps, a subconscious falling victim to a persistent if subterranean fear of appearing in a 22nd-century edition of Slonimsky) and they have as much right to hold them as I have to reject them (the enthusiasms, that is). A new year will presently be upon us, the traditional time for the making of resolutions. Let that be my very first.