I think there's a lot of common ground between snobbishness, 'tribalism', hero-worship and probably a few other common tendencies, George.  'Tribal' rivalry there certainly was but in my school rivals like the heavy rockers, the Northern Soul fans, the prog rockers etc would look down on the teeny boppers far more than they looked down on each other.  Of course, nobody actually called themselves teeny boppers - that was just what they were called when someone wanted to ridicule the music they listened to.  And of course there was a certain amount of affected or hypocritical admiration - an extreme example was a guy at college who developed a most uncharacteristic interest in the Four Tops after he discovered John Mclaughlin had been a session musician on some of their recordings!

To me snobbery implies a pettiness that isn't necessarily present in the other tendencies mentioned; and, by extension, accusing someone of snobbery merely because they find a certain artist unsatisfying is informed by the same pettiness.

In terms of the followers of RB (and RR and some others), there are certainly more than a few for whom it appeals as representing some ideal of ultra-masculinity, though.....

Only if the issue is about 'writing in the style'. Now, I don't want to reiterate an old-fashioned style-content dichotomy, but nonetheless still believe there is a dichotomy between idiom and individuation that is meaningful. By this I mean that it might be possible to inhabit some sort of idiom related to those of Nyman or Turnage, and do something meaningful with it (unlike either of them). Conversely, the interest for me in RB's music was to do with how, in the absence of emotional depth and subtlety, the earlier works in particular (and some of the later ones) represented a truly meaningful statement in opposition to the consumerist/deindividualising tendencies of modern British society, culture and consciousness, by pursuing a path entailing negation of these very attributes, and in the process revealing the very boundaries of that being negated, and as a consequence all else that lay beyond/remained repressed. Now I'm very much in two minds about whether these qualities are really manifest in some later works, and occasionally wonder if I was imagining some things in earlier times (though some of the articles from that time, such as 'Aesthetics and Ideology in the UK since Cardew', could certainly be evoked in support of something akin to that type of interpretation).

Anyhow, the essence of Nyman or Turnage is not really about their 'style', but the way in which their music relates to their cultural environment; in either case I see little more than a passive acquiescence with (and - worse - reinforcement and consolidation of) the most reactionary aspects of the society. Turnage writes light entertainment with sufficient snob value that serve the reactionary, socially divisive, ends to which new music is frequently appropriated.

Forgive a rare interjection, but this is illogical. It assumes that no composers, by following their own will in terms of what they can, want to and enjoy writing, can be successful. This is not true. I happen to know two or three who do, and are!

bws S-S!

[Edit: I haven't a clue what the picture is nor where it has come from.  ]

That's right, I should have expanded the point to make that explicit.  It's difficult to believe the same commitment to his personal artistic vision went into the cantatas as into The Well Tempered Clavier.  But the motives for that compromise wouldn't have been solely the expectation of commercial success (or whatever the equivalent of commercial success was in those days).  Other motives might be a sense of civic duty, his own religious conviction etc.

It could also suggest that there is more snobbery towards "pop" fans/listeners on this very board, expressed through very broad and rather disdainful comments about their discourses of value (which, like any other such discourses, are founded upon the idea that value amounts to something more/other than simply 'I like it') which are almost never applied to canonic ideologies concerning classical music. If there is a certain conservativism amongst rock/pop fans which leads to resistance to their bands' changing direction, that pales into insignificance when one considers how many classical listeners are either dismissive of practically anything produced in the last 60 years or so, or only value the latter to he extent it resembles earlier music. Throughout the whole of its history, classical music has been the preserve of higher classes in society, and served as a major factor in legitimising and consolidating the power of those classes, through processes of exclusion. That's one reason why all clasical music should be approached with a degree of scepticism - a question of what can be rescued from this music despite the extent to which it is bound up with unequal social structures.

Ian – are you concurring with that view, or simply pointing out that the viewpoint exists? 

I’m not sure it’s that cut and dried at all in reality.

I'm in no doubt that people do perceive an outward snobbery or elitism emanating from classical music, partly because they can't speak the language, and it can't be doing its popularity any good.

Do people on here regret that perception? 

I don’t think Classic FM does it any favours, because it plays such plain and boring pieces such a lot of the time.

You mean the snobbery towards pop fans/listeners, or the idea that value can mean more than simply personal taste? Certainly don't concur with the former, but I do with the latter. Would also say that classical 'tastes', as much as popular ones, have a lot to do with self-fashioning and identity, consciously or otherwise. Taste is rarely as innocent as it is sometimes supposed to be.

This book:



has much to say on these issues, including detailed empirical studies of the relationships between various musical tastes and social class - the study was undertaken in France, but I'm sure it would apply elsewhere as well. He looks at taste as a strategy for exclusion, a cultural means of bolstering the status and sense of superiority of certain classes, a distinct approach to a more old-fashioned leftist view that sees culture as nothing more than on outgrowth of economics. In Marxist terms, he could be said to deal with relatively autonomous processes within the superstructure that in themselves constitute a form of ideological hegemony as part of a strategy of resistance to changes in the base.

This book also deals with similar issues (in a somewhat more abstract sense) and is well worth reading:

A question of looking for what can be found that isn't irrevocably tainted, yes. If someone expressed similar sentiments with respect to some popular music (say, looking at what might be good about it despite its commercialism), I doubt it would be particular contentious.

All culture is on some sense a product of the society and ideologies of its time - not necessarily just a passive reflection of those (except for the lesser works), but almost never wholly autonomous of them. All classical music of the past, at least (and to an extent of today) is a product of reactionary societies and ideologies, in various manifestations and to various degrees, not least because of its (continuing) association with the higher classes. To take all that on board is to appreciate it better rather than worse, I would say.