In twenty-first-century America, certainly, high culture appears deeply subversive. Plato’s Republic teaches contempt for democracy as surely as King Lear teaches contempt for humanity. The Goldberg Variations are useless in the strict sense—they can be put to no use; they do nothing to make the listener more effective or a better citizen. Indeed, the most unsettling thing about high culture is that it is not a means to an end but an end in itself—which makes it the exact opposite of money, our usual standard for measuring worth.
I seem to have been very lucky. The Religious of the Sacred Heart who taught me in grade school were wont to remind us students that Philadelphia had one of the best art museums in the world and that we ought to visit it. Good student that I was, I visited the museum often during the summer, taking a trackless trolley to the El, which became the subway, which let me off at 15th Street, from where I would walk along the Parkway to the museum (to be fair, my mother had also taken my brother and me there and also to the Natural History Museum and of course the Franklin Institute). Philadelphia had a very good classical musical station when I was young (WFLN) and I was not the only teenager who listened to it as well as to rock stations. Those of my friends who listened to both rock and classical thought of the first as fun and of the second as something deeper than fun. But not all classical music is the same, either. I fell in love with Frederick Delius when I was in high school. Not everybody thinks Delius is all that great. But his music meant something to this young fellow who had grown up in a house surrounded (for a few years — until the developers came along) by woods, and with a stream in back. I read a lot of French poetry in translation back then, and Delius and Massenet (Scènes Alsacciennes) fired my imagination. I dreamed of living in 19th-century France. And so exhibit A (Tadaaki Otaka, by the way, is my candidate for the greatest living conductor):
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