Yes, everyone’s unique experience with music should be honored and not forced into accepting one truth or another. But there is a larger question for example of what music gets to be the music that artists learn from, what gets to be the music that gets performed over and over throughout time on the scale of hundreds of years, what music is seen as universal. So in a sense, I’m arguing not for the individual listener, but for a cultural force that happens whether or not you agree with it.

And keep in mind that I don’t think you need education to like classical music. Certainly it will deepen your understanding of it…as it will for any other kind of music. In fact, I would argue that we understand music partly because we are educated about it, just that we happen to be more educated about ubiquitous pop music in our society even though it feels instinctual.

I disagree with Debussy completely. Maybe he had powers of concentration and musical insight that allowed him to hear everything about a piece in one sitting. But even so, music is more than that. When we like music, I think we usually hear something that relates to other music we like and that has certain emotional suspensions and releases that are satisfying. So if the music doesn’t remind us of what we already know and like and if we can’t predict how the music is trying to give us emotional release, then our tendency is to say, “I don’t connect to this.” Your response, which I don’t agree with, is to say that this music has no substance. My response is to say, “Well, do I get what the composer is trying to do or am I just upset that this doesn’t conform to what I want music to do?”

I question and sometimes the question is fruitless, but when it’s bears fruit, you learn a new way of listening. This works also with listening to other classical musics, Persian, Indian, Balinese, etc. To expand your taste is in essence to find emotional connection to more art. The technical, theoretical, historical education comes later…imagination is more important.

I don’t really ascribe to the idea of inaccessibility equaling substance. I more regard it as a fault with the composition itself as much as a lack of substance is. A quote from Debussy comes to mind in which he says he didn’t believe repeated listening was necessary and that what ever you could gleam from a piece of music you could get on the first listen.

I think actual book learning could do nothing for someone’s ability to connect to the music on an emotional level. It could only lead to a deeper, non-emotional, intellectual appreciation of the technical aspects of the music or awareness of the cultural context and at best the zeightgiest of the time. In this sense the idea of people needing to be educated to connect with the music seems to have very little ground in reality and seems more like a symptom of the cultural elitism that surrounds classical music.

I think it may be an interesting side note to add here, that as far as I am aware much of the canon was built at a time when musicologists believed that they could objectively prove what good music through analysis was.

I find the argument of needing an education to be a very suspect. And one has only to look at the dogma wielded by the modernists (Schoenberg was virtually a cult leader), used to bully people into not believing in their own instincts, to see this at play within the elite itself.

I think people can only let their own sensibilities be their guide. They have to trust in their own responses and not be swayed by any “authority” on matters of subjective taste. Doing so will only lead to an impoverishment of the musical experience and, given enough people, on the art of music itself.

Can taste be cultivated? Perhaps, perhaps not. But any “evolution” that takes place should be natural, positive, honest and free from any outside ideas such as the desirability of liking certain music.

Is Classical music simply bluff and pretension par excellence? Is rock closer to a true expression of the human spirit devoid of the cultural constraints of the classical world? No one can give a cast iron answer to this question, be we can all feel what is true, and that is the only truth we should accept.

For example, some pieces of music I didn’t connect until I heard it a couple times. Others I connected to right away and then by the 10th time, I was sick of it and felt it had nothing left to offer me. In a real way, the music that we connect to the most is often the ones that don’t reveal themselves right away and require some diligence.

I happen to think that people might enjoy classical music more as a gut emotional feeling if they could imagine the music the way people did pre-recordings, pre-amplifications, pre-mass media…then Beethoven starts to feel more rock n’ roll and less elevator musak. If however, you don’t connect, no worries…there’s enough around that you probably like something great which I am oblivious to.

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Yeah, I’m aware of the many symphonies, piano concertos, etc. that he wrote too. Kind of like how Philip Glass is writing tons of music for various things, but ultimately he’s kind of thought of (and speaks of himself sometimes) as a theater/film composer.