Vivat Libertas

The other day I read a comment that really annoyed me about how normal people just can't get classical music, so classical musicians have a gift that they should share with the world. I am fully in support of the second part. I think art music might be complex, but it's amazingly fun to make and I want as many people as possible to have the chance to make that music. The first part? Not so much. I'm one of those "normal people" (well, not quite, but I'll come onto that later). I'm not a particularly talented musician, mostly because while I like music it doesn't have the same attraction for me that other subjects do. I got into music because of my amazing, gifted director John and because of practising a lot. That's all that happened. I don't have some sort of special classical music organ (pun unintended - sorry!) in my body. I'm an average schmo who trained a bit. I don't deserve to be elevated to an elite class. People who don...

Firstly, sorry for sporadic posting: school's started, I'm in sixth form now and therefore I'm back to long days and working my fat arse off during breaks, which I didn't do before, but AS levels (and a stray A level) are a fuckload of work and thus in order to not totally fail my subjects I do need to put more work in. I wasn't going to talk about that, though; I was going to talk about what I actually said  I was going to talk about - namely, classical music. For the pedants here, I don't mean the Classical period  of roughly 1750-1820, but Western art music (whether liturgical or secular) from about the 11th century onwards and continuing into the present time. The older I grow, the more disillusioned I become. I was raised in a tradition of classical music; my mother would pretty much always listen to Classic FM , a station I later grew old enough to detest, and then I started going to secondary school and joining a choir that basically chucked us in...