Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value (review)
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Johnson's book is an effort of advocacy: it makes a case for classical music in a time—during a "legitimization crisis"—when the demise of noncommercial music is predicted widely. An elite utopia devoted to art has been marginalized, Johnson argues, by cultural pluralism. A false presumption—that the dominance of commercial culture emerged from active choice—has made, Johnson argues, for a "pseudo-democracy" that keeps proponents of classical music from suggesting it reflects a higher order of listening, "a contemplative mode of being . . . denied to our generation." Johnson insists on the full engagement of mind in [End Page 499] musical experience and calls for "cultural resistance" to the "prerational" intellect of popular culture. Doubts arise from his undifferentiated attitude toward all popular music and his assumption of an absolute line between art and entertainment. Still, his book moves with ease between the concrete and the abstract, if not between the popular and the elite.
William Weber, professor of modern European history at California State University, Long Beach, is the author of Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna, 1830-1848 and The Rise of Musical Classics: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology.
