“Who Cares if You Listen?”, it read, a damning introduction to the 1958 treatise on audience culture by the American serialist Milton Babbitt. His article went on: “The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners on the one hand, and traditional music and its following on the other, is not accidental and – most probably – not transitory.”
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The tricky matter of striking just the right note
It has been more than half a century since High Fidelity magazine ran its most infamous, most inflammatorily flippant of headlines.
