Who Needs Classical Music? Quotes

“As any painter, writer, or
composer knows, artworks arise from the tension between their physical
materials and the thought or spirit that shapes them from within. Though
they require some outward, physical element, they cease to function as art
when they are reduced to their objectlike, artifactual element. This definitive tension underlies art’s varied social uses and explains how it came to
be celebrated on the one hand as an expression of the highest spiritual
achievements of humanity and, on the other, criticized as merely another
precious object—a trapping of wealth, privilege, and social exclusion.
Even in the heyday of classical music, there was always a gap between the
philosophical claims for music and social practice”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“There is no inherent value in simply surrounding oneself with great music and art; what matters is the degree of exposure one is prepared to give, accompanied by the going out of the receptive mind, the active encounter with the object. The fetishism of art objects has not helped art’s cause at all. Attributing value to the object rather than the encounter underlies the arrogant dismissal of so many works. “If I don’t get it, it’s no good” is a mind-set that will never understand art because it fails to understand that art requires a humility and patience in the face of the object—and not mere passivity either, but an active opening of our responses.”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“Ironically, for all that youth culture rejects classical music as old-fashioned and out-ofdate, it is the way it is because of an excess of rational thought; it is, literally, too modern. Instead, youth culture yearns for a prerational immediacy, that of the body, of libidinal energy, and for the luxury of blind, adolescent emotions without consequences or responsibilities. Ironic, too, is that popular culture presents a prerational consciousness as the absolutely modern.”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“Art mediates our experience of the world and of ourselves by dealing
with limits, boundaries, and borders in a way that real life rarely allows. Not only is art often concerned with the outer limits of our experience; it is often concerned with the limits of its own expressive capacities. Art claims a unique capacity for representing and enacting the transgression of limits. It defines limits through its discursive logic, which it transgresses even as it presents them. In this, it articulates a fundamental human aspiration; in the activity of its thinking, it goes beyond its material individuality. It projects a symbolic meaning through the patterning of its materials without obliterating their particularity. In this way art accomplishes its primary goal: to recreate the world, to transform it in the crucible of human creativity.”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“It is a paradox, then, that while we insist on the sovereignty of individual choice in all that we do and buy as fundamental to our idea of democracy, we have all but expunged the claims of judgment as such. It is symptomatic of our politically correct sensitivities that the idea of choice has
almost replaced the idea of discrimination, a word that has entirely negative connotations today. To be discriminating used to mean to be capable
of exercising judgment—to be wise, in fact. It implied that one understood
the world and could discern the difference between things. We can hardly
use “discrimination” in this way anymore, because the idea of discrimination is now inextricably linked to the idea of rejection and exclusion (whether on racial, sexual, or other grounds).”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“art’s specific and distinctive claim rests on something beyond its immediate potency and that a richer understanding of it involves a sensitivity to its formal properties that goes beyond its immediate emotional effect. A”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“Where music survives in formal education, it has of necessity shifted its focus over the last generation to mirror everyday culture rather than to reflect upon it. One”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“Most people would fiercely resist the idea that they need any instruction in how to listen to music. Because we can hear, we think we can listen. But just because we can see, we don’t assume we can read. Reading”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value