“Music is enjoyed everywhere around the world, but custodians of the Western canon of classical music have long maintained that not all music is created equal,” writes Richard Reeb in Wednesday’s (1/23) Victorville Valley Daily Press (CA). “They say [that] not only are the works of great symphonic music beautiful, but they are the best. Can that really be true or is that yet another example of cultural bias? Two works on these contentious issues, ‘Culture Counts: Faith & Feeling in a World Besieged,’ a book by British philosopher Roger Scruton, and ‘Front and Center: The Place for Western Classical Music in the Curriculum,’ an essay by music professor Don Asia in Academic Questions, published by the National Association of Scholars, emphatically come down on the side of the superiority of Western classical music over all others. This is admittedly pretty bold, if not brazen, on these gentlemen’s parts, but they make a powerful case…. But how can a similar rule be applied to music, of all things which, while it is a universal phenomenon, is widely believed to be an art guided by mere taste and not by any transcendent standard?”
Posted January 25, 2019
