Who Needs Classical Music? by Julian Johnson

Why listening to music is an act of cultural resistance to market forces

There's nothing new in this book, in the sense that its points have all been made elsewhere. Yet the light Julian Johnson shines on a tired old debate could not be more new. To illustrate why, there's no better place to start than its discussion of musical newness itself. Julian Johnson likens a first listening to a first encounter with a person. Having met them once, have we exhausted all they have to offer?

Classical music, he suggests, should be viewed as a language, in that it's governed by contradiction, surprise, tension, and resolution. What makes a piece repeatable is the way it helps us to "relive" the voyage of discovery that each performance enacts. If the "new" in music were literally new – like using a scale never used before – its novelty would rapidly wear thin. That is why works by Beethoven are still more refreshing than anything by Birtwistle, Glass, Reich, Nyman, or any other heroes of the contemporary scene.

On the other hand, Reich, Glass and Nyman sit far more comfortably than Beethoven in the Late Junction playlist on Radio 3, and could be said to be supremely "popular". Over on Classic FM, Beethoven can never compete with hallowed chunks of Vivaldi and Albinoni or Vaughan Williams's "The Lark Ascending".

About this arbitration by the market, Johnson has trenchant things to say. The sort of music thus favoured is almost always a miniature, has "deliberate depthlessness" and has nothing to do with art. It's designed to induce a mood, inimical to thought. The market first commodifies music, then standardises it through packaging. When the product sits on the same shelf as feng shui and massage books, its reduction to a fashion accessory is complete. At which point the notion of devoting one's whole attention to music – and thinking about it – becomes positively outlandish.

Yet that's what Johnson wants us to do. The way he presents it, playing and listening to classical music becomes an act of cultural resistance to the value-free relativism of the marketplace. He makes short work of those who use the label "élitist" to damn classical music in its entirety. People may use Haydn's music for élitist social ends, but that's a different matter. He excoriates those for whom "discrimination" is a pejorative term, as opposed to being a description of one of humankind's most constructive activities.

Who Needs Classical Music? is a short book – really an extended essay – and it stays mostly in the realm of theoretical generalisation. This can be frustrating (Johnson skates blithely past the question of whether Boulez and his acolytes took music up a blind alley), but it does allow him to keep the focus on issues that cultural commentators prefer to gloss over. And repeatedly he brings the argument back to education, where it belongs.

"There is something suspect," he observes, "about a music education that focuses overwhelmingly on the music people consider their own." By endorsing all kinds of music with equal enthusiasm, the education system reproduces the relativism of the market; by limiting training in classical music to pupils whose parents can afford to pay for it, it perpetuates social divisions.