Classical Music

Books: The Musical Mystique

Defending classical music against its devotees.

Richard Taruskin, The New Republic Published: Monday, October 22, 2007

Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value
By Julian Johnson

(Oxford University Press, 140 pp., $25)

Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears

By Joshua Fineberg
(Routledge, 162 pp., $21.95)

Why Classical Music Still Matters

By Lawrence Kramer
(University of California Press, 242 pp., $24.95)

As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it--and why not?--as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. (My favorite example right now is Gabriel Prokofiev, the British-born grandson of the Russian composer, who studied electronic music in school, has headed a successful disco-punk band, and is now writing string quartets.) Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. All three of our authors seem reluctant to acknowledge this ineluctable fact. But change is not always loss, and realizing this should not threaten but console.