There has been an example of snobbery here, or at the R3mb, can't remember exactly.

I had expressed my disappointment at not understanding some tuneless, keyless contemporary music and was sneeringly told by certain members that there's something wrong with my ears or my brain.

I don't let such snobbery bother me 


John W

Another aspect of musical snobbery is what i call the CFM aversion. CFM is a target for much musical snobbery not because the music they play is bad but the range of their reportoire is severely limited and they insist on playing the same musical chunks over and over again. Trouble is when hearing say Dvorak New World or Elgar Cello Concerto it does tend to dilute the greatness of these works because of the vast repetition. Dare i say it but some programmes on R 3 also seem to be doing this too which is a bit disturbing!

In the context of this thread, this article, which has been discussed on the Music and Society board but not here, I think, may be of interest to some.

Of course, it isn't the likes and dislikes in themselves that make someone a snob, it's the way he/she talks about them, it's the thought that they function as indicators of social status.

I’d like if I may to go back to the issue touched on earlier about subjective “liking” versus objective appreciation.  I can’t help thinking about the idea I first came across in Pirsig’s book “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” that people divide into those with classical and those with romantic tendencies, and that these tendencies would more than likely define how someone approached appreciation of music.  

If I turn out to be a romantic sort, am I therefore simply “wrong” to find a lot of Mozart a bit dull and twee?  He may well have been a great genius, but nobody is forcing me to listen to him – it’s not my job.

Of course Pirsig goes on to argue that for real quality of life we ought to seek a combination of the two, which I can see makes sense, but even if I understand why this bit of Mozart is so influential and progressive, the bottom line is that I don’t want to listen to it for very long because I prefer other composers.

If we really are saying that to appreciate classical music you need to take time to understand it, then no wonder classical music is so unpopular with the masses.  If I had never heard anything other than Beethoven and Mozart, I probably wouldn’t like it either but I’m fortunate enough to have had parents who introduced me to a range of classical music, which was followed by a desperate wish to play the violin, thereby introducing me to more, so I’ve had the opportunity to be rampantly subjective until I found stuff I liked.  So shoot me.

Much of the inverted snobbery that for instance I faced at school about my musical taste is rooted in fear and that all too common tendency to decry that which you don’t “get”.

It would also be enormously easy for someone to look at this discussion and brand everyone involved as a music snob, based on the fact that they understood about every 7th word.   It can simply be a word that gets thrown at people to make them shut up and stop scaring people, essentially.

I think of 'snob' is one of those 'own goal' words that bounce back and damage the argument of the user rather than the supposed recipient. They are therefore best kept to be used about oneself, as and when appropriate, rather than other people.

Others include 'bigoted', 'knee-jerk reaction', 'narrow-minded', 'unthinking', 'parroting', 'shallow', 'hysterical' ... that sort of thing. But oddly it's always other people they seem to apply to.


[Whoops! Bad timing there. <cough> Sorry about that   How are the top level policy discussions about the Delete button coming along? ]

Sorry to use personal experience again - bulletin boards are places to spout wild all-embracing theories - but I noticed, particularly when teaching grade 5 theory and beyond, how easy it is to subvert the ‘3 chord brigade’ who infest Western pop music. After a while most people, when exposed to harmonically more complex material - less conservative/conventional music - start to find the F, G, C progression boring. It helps when they know what a triad is, have a bit of ear training, and can follow a score (stuff which takes a few weeks to teach). They then listen to music sold by EMI and think ‘Hmmmm, what’s the point?’ or ‘For God’s sake play a 7th or a 9th, or get your arse into the relative minor! Jeesh!’ The become impatient and critical of Victora Beckham. Does anyone want to argue that's a bad thing?  

So the three chord tradition, embedded in the music which drives Western youth culture, only works if Western youth is kept musically ignorant. That helps explain why my pop group friends - who were making large sums of money from the culture - became so excited when I criticised it: deep down they know they’re producing conservative tripe which only works if their audience is kept ignorant, which is a double irony for a leftist band.

They remind me of other musical authoritarians in history - Plato, medieval Popes, Stalin - who recognised the power of music and, for political or financial reasons, wished to keep the proles ignorant.

Of course, it’s harder to criticise snobbery in pop music compared to classical. Everyone can recognise a classical music snob at twenty paces. But pop music snobs can also be dealt with, and it’s quite funny because they’re not used to being challenged to defend the music they serve up, and may gobble like turkeys when asked a polite question!


Trouble is, the word ‘snob’ is very much part of the English language, especially in poor old Britain with its history of class politics. People are sensitive about snobbery. It winds them up. They don’t like others looking down their noses at them, using music as a stick to beat them with. You just have to consider the history of British comedy to see how embedded it is in British culture - the popular tradition of laughing at snobs. So it’s a tricky word to banish.