Classical music, elitism, and places to start

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross is sounding a lot like samantha2074 in this article on how elitism hurts classical music:

I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. [...]

When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.” The music is described in terms of its distance from the present, its resistance to the mass—what it is not. You see magazines with listings for Popular Music in one section and for Classical Music in another, so that the latter becomes, by implication, Unpopular Music. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are so commonplace.

When Sam listens to classical music she often dances and jumps around like one enthralled, which she is. It isn't something she listens to because it's good for her, like eating her peas.

I found this via Chad Orzel, who is feeling faintly embarrassed by his ignorance of the field and was interested to see Ross's arbitrary list of ten albums to start with. I like Ross's approach: he specifically doesn't pretend to be defining a canon (Orzel calls them "ten essential albums", but I don't think Ross thinks of them that way at all). It's just what he says when somebody asks him to recommend something. I have similar stuff I say about literary science fiction.

Anyway, I'm not a very musical guy, and most of what I know about classical music, I got from Sam: because of her I've become a fan of the 19th- and 20th-century English and American wind band repertoire. It's possible that this particular material tends to arouse populist feelings in its aficionados, if only because those who favor symphonic works seem to look down on it: it's not the maximum-status Alpha Subgenre in the hierarchy of classical music elitism. Also, it's often got a beat and you can march to it.

Also, actually, I have the same problem with modern (say, post-1994 or so) pop music that Orzel does with classical music. The stuff I like is mostly bands I became acquainted with before then, related works, and—increasingly—music made by people I personally know. I'm sure there's much good stuff out there that I'm missing, but most of it is probably frightfully obscure, the material that is very popular doesn't often grab me, and the stuff liked by people whose taste I respect, and material recommended on "if you like this you'll like that" grounds, also doesn't often grab me. As far as I can tell, on the whole it's actually no worse than it was when I was a teenager in the 1980s—if anything, what's shocking is how little the style of the stuff on the radio has changed since then. Even so, there's enough music I do like that I'm not feeling terribly deprived; but it sometimes makes me feel like an ignoramus in the presence of ones who know.