On snobbery and classical music

People (like me) who mainly listen to so-called "classical music" are often - both implicitly and explicitly - accused of snobbery. The assumption that dedicated classical music listeners are somehow elitist is everywhere, and has even been internalised in the classical music world itself: so often, concert promoters, radio stations, award panels, arts councils, local councils, funding councils and so on insist on a false inclusiveness, an avowedly "low-brow" approach which amounts to a patronising attempt to broaden audiences beyond the white middle-classes. The fact that classical music listeners and practitioners have never been exclusively white or middle-class is lost and ignored for political reasons. Look at Mahler, rising from the Jewish working classes in a Bohemian backwater to being declared the "most famous man on earth"; look at Goldmark, who rose from obscurity and starvation; look at Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ....

No: it's assumed that classical music is still an elitist, snobbish and exclusive club which needs taking down a peg or two. The irony is that I've met lots of "pop musos" in my time, whose pride in their own pop knowledge, and whose derision at kinds of pop music they perceive as overly populist and commercial is at least as elitist as any classical musician. But, because they're into pop music no one ever dreams of accusing them of snobbery.

This modern belief that classical music is somehow inherently snobbish, and that it's only of interest to an exclusive middle or upper-class clique has, I think, had the effect in education of actually reducing opportunities for lower-middle-class or lower-class students in music. Because it is assumed that classical music is of interest only to an elite; because it is assumed that no one would want to study it from other backgrounds; because of a false kind of inclusiveness which reduces classical music to the status of an expensive luxury which must always be leavened with pop and other kinds of music; because of all this, classical music in education has, through no fault of its own, been partly shut off from state education.

This is also partly, I think, because music itself is perceived to be useless (an old British failing), and state education is even more utilitarian and gradgrindish than it used to be - and a Gradgrind can't see any reason for working class people to dedicate themselves to music. Classical music in particular takes a lifetime of dedication and training, and the benefits it brings don't fit in with a National Curriculum devoted to utility and immediate money-making results.

Hence, peripetetic music lessons, GCSEs and A' Levels in Music, proper classical training are the first things to be cut in schools, and particularly academies built on the New Labour Gradgrind model, which seem designed (ironically for a Labour invention) to train and keep the urban working classes in so-called "practical" jobs. In this context, classical music is in danger of being forced into the position that it's actually never been in before, in terms of education: it's in danger of being made into the exclusive province of private school education.