27)

...Why does Classical Music still matter?...

"It is no good mincing words or hiding behind a false sense of sophistication. This music still matters for the same reasons that Greek drama or Renaissance painting or modernist fiction matter: because it made discoveries we are far from done with and that are far from done with us. it has imagined forms of experience that became substantial realities in being thus imagined: forms of being, becoming, sensing, witnessing, remembering, desiring, hoping, suffering, and more.
By making such things audible, classical music enlarges the capacity of all music to attach itself, and us, more closely to whatever we care about. The tradition that tells us to listen to classical works for their own sake alone is an inadvertent betrayal of that care Music is our premier embodiment of the drive for attachment. It works, it grips or grasps us, almost with the electricity of touch, resonant, perhaps, with the primary experiences of bonding that tie us to each other and the world. Music of all kinds invokes this bonding; classical music dramatizes and reflects on it in the act of invocation.
The power to do this is tangible and exhilarating. It is the power by which we make the world meaningful. Its felt presence is the reason why we keep coming back to the works and styles through which that power runs: coming back to them as sources of pleasure and puzzlement, of self-discovery and self-bafflement. Other music also has things to say to us; there is no doubt about that. But no other music tells us the things that this music does. The Western world is not only the richer for preserving Sophocles' Antigone or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but different. At one time the difference was available only to a small minority, but technology has long since taken care of that. This music now belongs to anyone who cares to listen. Its fusion of knowledge and power can be demanding, even disturbing. Contrary to the tiresome slogan, classical music does not relax you. But it can transfix you, perhaps even transform you."
- Lawrence Kramer, Why Classical Music Still Matters

This is the only part of the book that he claims to have thought about. Hence this is the only part of the book worth reading.

How and why this is all possible was never satisfactorily explained to me.

Futhon