Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
Interpretation
Classical music is an acquired taste that requires deeper understanding rather than being universally appreciated.
Allan Bloom's quote highlights the notion that classical music is akin to complex subjects like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeologyβit is not easily accessible or understood by everyone. Instead, it represents a specialized appreciation that goes beyond mainstream culture and casual conversation, indicating that true understanding of such art forms requires significant effort and insight.
In practice
During a music appreciation course, I quoted Bloom to emphasize the depth of understanding required to truly enjoy classical music.
The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.
Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.
Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
A parallel between color and music can only be relative β just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments.
The institutions of human society treat us as parts of a machine. They assign us ranks and place considerable pressure upon us to fulfill defined roles. We need something to help us restore our lost and distorted humanity. Each of us has feelings that have been suppressed and have built up inside. There is a voiceless cry resting in the depths of our souls, waiting for expression. Art gives the soul's feelings voice and form.
No picture is made to endure nor to live with but it is made to sell and sell quickly with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper.
Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.
Often a single experience will open the young soul to music for a whole lifetime
I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.
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