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Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

Book by Julian Johnson · 3 quotes · Classical Music, Art, Music

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Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value 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”

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Book:Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value
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“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.”

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“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.”

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Book:Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value
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