Status Updates From Who Needs Classical Music?:...

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 means gaining familiarity with shared social conventions so that we can understand how literary texts work

Sound recording, like all technologies, is a double-edged sword. It makes available musical possibilities that earlier ages could not have dreamed of: at a touch of a button, anywhere on the planet, I can access fantastic performances by leading international artists, dead and alive, of virtually any piece I might think of. But at the same time, a distinctive requirement of music-as-art .

Art’s apparent refusal of the everyday is not a refusal of the “human” as such: it is a refusal of the idea that the sum of what it is to be human is found in the everyday. By the same token, popular culture’s refusal of art comes close to an affirmation of the everyday as a closed universe,

One understands that a novel makes best sense when read in its entirety and that if you leave a play after the first act, it will probably be less satisfying than seeing the whole thing. Most people stay to the end of the film. Classical music is designed in a similar way; its distinctive sense and meaning are gleaned by hearing a piece in its entirety.