James Tobin wrote:

>More or less at the same time there was an article in Harpers or the
>Atlantic which shocked me by its (then new) multicultural claims that
>classical music was simply one of several musical traditions, none of
>which were better or more privileged than any other.  Not the notion
>I was brought up on.

Indeed and, I submit, absolute drivel.  Isn't it strange that the whole
"world music" movement seems to have elevated every *other* form of music
above what we might loosely call western classical music.

WCM is a unique artform IMHO and deserves to be celebrated.  Nobody is
EVER going to convince me that Britneyt Spears is deserving of mention
in the same brath (on the same planet?) as Beethoven.

>Again about thirty years ago, at an aesthetics
>conference in Toronto I was called an elitist by the author of a paper
>on commercialism in art--his position was basically just give the people
>what they want--because I suggested that you could educate people to
>appreciate music that they might not happen to like yet.  I had been
>asked to comment on his paper because I had submitted one attempting to
>distinguish between entertainment and art--an endeavor I have since
>abandoned--at least in public.

As Paul Weller once put it "the public wants what the public gets".

Deryk Barker <[log in to unmask]>