Music is the least understood of the arts, and the most abused. No one seriously speaks of Shakespeare and Peanuts (or Tintin) in the same breath, but "music"--especially here in Austin, "live music capital of the world"--is open to all, with no barriers of taste or education. Bob Dylan's Beethoven's equal, and yo Ludwig, roll over anyway, there's a new game in town. (But who seems more dated now, Beethoven or Chuck Berry?) You have to say "Classical Music" if you want to be understood as referring to Music The Art Form rather than "music" as perpetrated by any number of country-and-western-rock-fusion bands. It's an inaccurate neologism anyway, since the classical period in music ended with Haydn; referring to Mahler's compositions as being part of "classical" music is as silly as calling Picasso an Impressionist. But this ignorance is reinforced by social prejudices; I couldn't begin to count the number of otherwise educated people I've known who were right at home with Jane Austen and Rilke, never mind Hunter Thompson and Joyce Carol Oates, but who would no more go to the opera than to the moon, and for whom the name "Mozart," say, is a synonym for weird, old, boring, and dead. And as usual I've come across reinforcements in my stash of quotations. This is from the critic Stephen Pettit, writing in The Spectator about the limitations of pop music.

"Consider what the genre of the pop song generally demands of its creator. At best it can approach the outwardly simple lyric subtlety of Schubert. But mostly as music it is pretty crude. No organic exploration (Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner), collisions of musical types (Monteverdi, Messiaen), or complex layerings (Bruckner, Stravinsky, Carter). No dynamic shading, since everything is loud. No subtle instrumentation. An insistent tribal drum thud. Limited harmonies. Normally, a rigid four beats to a bar, and an equally rigid tempo, defined in bpms (beats per minute). It’s most often a music about pulse and power. Even in progressive rock, the spirit of musical adventure is severely restricted. Which is right, for its language suits its purpose… Few rock stars know much about the commitment and skills that it takes to be a real musician, about the tedious hours spent practising each day, about the requirement to stand back and ruthlessly self-criticize, about the demands of getting inside a piece of real music. Few would tolerate the insecurity of an orchestral musician’s working environment, or know just how much courage it takes to mount the stage night after night and do the physically impossible. Few can contemplate the agonies that a composer puts himself or herself through in order to find the inner voice, the language, the form, the right sound for the moment."