In I am a strange loop, Douglas Hofstadter writes.
"I have to admit that I have always intuitively felt there was another and quite different yardstick for measuring consciousness, although a most blurry and controversial one: musical taste. I certainly cannot explain or defend my own musical taste, and I know I would be getting myself into very deep, hot, and murky waters if I were to try, so I won't even begin. I will, however, have to reveal a little bit of my musical taste in order to talk about Albert Schweitzer and his musical profundity."
In another passage he wrote, after detailing his failed attempt to love Bartok's Second Violin Concerto.
"I need not go on and on, because I am sure that every reader has experienced chemistries and non-chemistries of this sort - perhaps even relating to the BartĂłk and Prokofiev violin concertos in exactly the reverse fashion from me, but even so, the message I am trying to convey will come across loud and clear. Music seems to me to be a direct route to the heart, or between hearts - in fact, the most direct. Across-the-board alignment of musical tastes, including both loves and hates - something extremely rarely run into - is as sure a guide to affinity of souls as I have ever found. And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other's essences, have great potential to live inside each other."
The general public knows, implicitly and at the back of their heads, that classical music is generally more "complex" and "deep" than the music they listen to, and they know that they cannot comprehend it, so their contempt is a defense mechanism against the realization of their own inferiority.
This is a forum where my online identity is completely separate from my real identity, so I'm not afraid of landing myself in hot, murky waters. It I can't express my indefensible beliefs here, where can I?
If you can't appreciate The Jupiter Symphony or Opus 131, that shows a deficiency on your part, not the work's.
My biggest vice is a lack of appreciation for Handel, I can't get into his operas, but I'm making progress.
Before the passage above he wrote this.
"Having painted myself into a corner in the preceding section, I'll go out on a limb and make a very crude stab at such a distinction. To do so I will merely cite two ends of a wide spectrum, with yourself and myself, dear reader, presumably falling somewhere in the mid-range (but hopefully closer to the "high" end than to the "low" one). At the low end, then, I would place uncontrollably violent psychopaths - adults essentially incapable of internalizing other people's (or animals') mental states, and who because of this incapacity routinely commit violent acts against other beings. It may simply be these people's misfortune to have been born this way, but whatever the reason, I class them at the low end of the spectrum. To put it bluntly, these are people who are not as conscious as normal adults are, which is to say, they have smaller souls. I won't suggest a numerical huneker count, because that would place us in the domain of the ludicrous. I simply hope that you see my general point and don't find it an immoral view. It's not much different, after all, from saying that such people should be kept behind bars, and no one I know considers prisons to be immoral institutions per se (it's another matter how they are run, of course). What about the high end of the spectrum? I suspect it will come as no surprise that I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths. This means gentle people such as Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and César Chávez - extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent fashions. Such people, I propose, are more conscious than normal adults are, which is to say, they have greater souls. Although I seldom attach much weight to the etymologies of words, I was delighted to notice, when preparing a lecture on these ideas a few years ago, that the word "magnanimity", which for us is essentially a synonym of "generosity", originally meant, in Latin, "having a great soul" (animus meaning "soul"). It gave me much pleasure to see this familiar word in a new light, thanks to this X-ray. (And then, to my surprise, in preparing this book's rather fanatical index, I discovered that "Mahatma" - the title of respect usually given to Gandhi - also means "great soul".) Another appealing etymology is that of "compassion", which comes from Latin roots meaning "suffering along with". These hidden messages echoing down the millennia stimulated me to explore this further."
He makes a sloppy attempt at articulating what makes a person "great souled", but this is sloppy and sentimental, because there are merely figures who have accomplished things he deems heroic, fitting in with his conception of the political good, etc Trying to align "great souled" with morality is difficult because different worldviews judges world historical figures differently. This directly contradicts his thesis on the link between good taste in music and "great souled-ness" because Hitler and Stalin also had good taste in music (Hitler worshiped Wagner, Stalin's favorite piece of music was Mozart's 20th Piano Concerto, Lenin was moved by Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata to tears, etc, not to mention that Wagner himself was a blackguard, shamelessly seducing the wives of his friends, etc).
It's the hardest being middlebrow, those with merely "good", "decent" taste; you have to fend off those with genuinely great taste above you, and the hoards below you. See image.
These middlebrow people are the most vicious, the most inhuman, the most cruel and most hypocritical.
The same people sending not-sure-if-serious death wishes to Rebecca Black are the same people who would bash anyone who championed Wagner in public as a "hoary hipster".