Text and videos on classical music and its value

Text and videos on classical music and its value. You can read the full article here from Justin Taylor's excellent blog.

Who Needs Classical Music?

Mars Hill Audio’s Ken Myers writes about Julian Johnson’s book Who Needs Classic Music: Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Oxford University Press, 2002):

It is a slender but powerful examination of this huge cultural change; in its 130 pages, Johnson explores how various aesthetic, social, philosophical, commercial, and technological changes have pushed the most artful forms of music to the margins of American cultural life.
Central to his study is the question of objective aesthetic value; in the opening pages, he challenges the dominant democratic belief in the “equal validity of all cultural products,” noting that it is generally assumed in modern cultures that, “in matters of musical judgment, the individual can be the only authority.” Johnson puts this assumption in some historical perspective:

This is in sharp contrast to the relatively minor status of individual “taste” in Western musical practice and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks until the late eighteenth century. To an earlier age, our contemporary idea of a complete relativism in musical judgment would have seemed nonsensical. One could no more make valid individual judgments about music than about science. Music was no more “a matter of taste” than was the orbit of the planets or the physiology of the human body. From Plato to Helmholtz, music was understood to be based on natural laws, and its value was derived from its capacity to frame and elaborate these laws in musical form. Its success was no more a matter of subjective judgment than the laws themselves.

Johnson’s survey of the cultural status quo vis-à-vis music goes beyond the question of cosmic order and objective aesthetic value to discuss the nature of aesthetic experience, the effects of recording and playback technologies on our emotional expectations, the role of markets and democracy in shaping our assumptions about music, and the complex interaction between thought, emotion, and embodiment made uniquely possible in music. I can think of no better introduction to the significance of the changes in American musical culture (and in the life of churches) over the past 40 years

If you haven’t already seen it, the following winsome and infectious presentation by Benjamin Zander—who has no doubts that he can convince you to love and understand classical music—is well worth your time: