>Of course, the pwog-left has long
>since given up on classical music as it is just ever so terribly elitist.
Not me. I'm all for high bourgeois culture. I started listening to classical music as a youngster, and spent years studying it too. But after a while, I burned out on the canon - there's only so much really good stuff, and after 20 years, you've heard it all a million times. You can always unearth an obscure toccata by an obscure Silesian, but it would probably be an upscale form of easy listening (which is no doubt what the Prince who commissioned it was looking for).
The culture surrounding jazz has always mystified me. Though it's a kind of "popular" music, there's an air of painfully high seriousness among afficionados. Jazz DJs assume a tone of almost funereal reverence when they identify what they've just played, and read the name of everyone associated with the recording except the janitor who swept the studio. It's like they're trying soooo hard to be taken seriously that you almost suspect them of a cultural anxiety about not being really serious. I mean, not everything has to be on a par with the Hammerklavier sonata.
Doug