Yes, and he spins a narrative in which, from the age of 10 onwards (actually earlier if one also includes when his mother was first taken away, though that was before the beginning of the Third Reich), his life overlaps with various major events of the Reich and the war. Now there was an awful lot going on in the various areas where he lived/went to school, and various major military projects and atrocities (some of which have only recently come to light) which involved (by compulsion) young people. And somehow S's narrative places him totally outside of all that - I know for sure that this wouldn't have been easy to achieve without some considerable effort. On the most basic level, from March 1939 it was compulsory for all children aged 10 or over to become members of the Hitler Youth. Of the group of that generation I've been studying (thirteen different composers), only two of them - Henze and Schnebel - have been open about that. Some of the others may have been able to get out of it (one of them was living in hiding, having had a Jewish mother), but it certainly wouldn't have been easy. The fact that there are no central files of Hitler Youth membership makes investigation of this matter difficult. It was seen as a step on the way to serving in the armed forces, which several of them did do. I'm not going to divulge the findings of my research here other than to say that there's clearly much more to most of these people's stories than they would like to distribute for public consumption.

Ron, I'm happy for this stuff to go in another thread if others are as well.

I don't think the original article was specifically directed at Ian, Reiner...

Well, what is an example of a coherent argument? Who are those few? Are you one of them?

Just one thing -

I'm not actually sure who the original article is aimed at. Since surveys consistently show that a minority of the general population even know who Beethoven is, the claim for RVW as a "household name" must be a gross overstatement. Of that small percentage who do know who RVW is, I would suggest that many of them have paid enough attention to affairs at ENO, Glyndebourne, the Proms and Covent Garden over the last few years to at least have heard of Birtwistle and Davies, and probably even Maw (through Sophie's Choice).* The set of people who do know who RVW is, but don't know who Birtwistle is (as per the article's opening paragraph) is, I would venture, a very small percentage of the population at large.

*They may not have heard much of the music, but that's not the article's claim. And, in fact, how many people have really heard much RVW beyond Tallis and Lark?

Well, the argument ends up coming down to whether you believe that the mediation and articulation of the human experience through art is vitally important to contemporary social existence. Assuming that the answer conceives of art as being something more than a commodity to be savaged by the so-called Free Market, then I would think that the representatives of the people have an obligation to step in where other funding is not forthcoming.

In terms of whether people should be able to complain about their tax dollar/pound being spent on such things, I firmly believe that most people don't really know what's good for them in this regard. How many do you know who would voluntarily contribute financially to the upkeep of a police force, road maintenance, public transport, etc?

Which leads us back to the original topic - the author doesn't seem to be able to conceive of art music as being anything other than a commodity. A point implicit in his article is that if a composer connects with The Audience, the box office will show. Obviously, it's wonderful when great art does connect with a broad audience, but as anybody that knows anything about music knows already, this is a very complex issue, related in a big way to things such as education.

And I'm still no closer to ascertaining exactly what the point of the article was.  

Never mind that, practically any reasonably large industry receives something in the way of subsidy, either by the direct application of public monies or by certain taxes being kept artificially low (which you could argue is the same thing I suppose). The reason is the same, to spare areas of activity which are judged as being valuable from the law of the jungle. The question might just as well be why the piffling sums involved in keeping classical music going come under such fierce attack.

I appreciate that, R, but practically any extended discussion on this board has those sorts of detours. They're very rarely something that could possibly be signalled, still less comprehensively covered, by the thread title (if you were really trying to do so, this thread would also have content about arts funding, Trotskyism, Mao's human rights record, the twists and turns of Cornelius Cardew's musical and political affiliations ... sometimes all in the same message). Can't we just accept that this is in the nature of discussions among informed participants with wide-ranging interests: of course it's not ideal in every way, but neither (in my view at least) is a situation where every topic detour gets re-assigned to its own thread. Keeping them in the same thread encourages a to and fro between the main topic and the sometimes apparently-unrelated sub-topics to which it gives rise, and maintains the sense that all of these subjects are more or less interlinked in the grander scheme of things, which to me is one of the greatest joys of this messageboard.

Indeed. But the rich don't get richer by not worrying about piffling sums, unfortunately, and their ruthlessness is not to be underestimated. The collective wealth of the thousand richest people in Britain has quadrupled since 1997 and now stands at £412 billion, that's right, almost exactly one thousand times the Arts Council's entire annual budget. I've already mentioned the annual defence budget of the UK, which is almost a hundred times that of the ACE. (Of course the difference pales into insignificance next to the equivalent figures for the USA.) It's enough to make you think that there's something so subversive about artistic creation that it has to be suppressed, by starving it of funds and by spreading propaganda about its "elitism". Stephen Pollard doesn't want more tunes, he wants more cash in the hands of his class.