Do Gramophone readers do competitive or dangerous sports?

You seem to be a bit grumpy David.  Have you tried listening to any relaxing music?  I find that Mozart is great for my mood enhancement.

Yes John, David may be the grit in the oyster but he's a bit patronizing.  And in any case, some people are happy within their comfort zone.

By way of positing the other side to David's argument, many readers probably feel that the championing of what is here referred to as the "minor tonal composers etc" is something the record labels are to be celebrated for doing, often against commercial sense, and that it's the concert halls who will less often take such risks with such repertoire. Some wonderful works have been rediscovered by many listeners in this manner.

(Incidentally, to link the title and topic, I've enjoyed combining music and - vaguely - dangerous sports by taking my mountain bike to both Leith Hill and the Malverns. Though I defy anyone to claim such places are in any sense associated with mere minor tonal composers etc...)

David's is an entertaining and thought-provoking argument.   However, the expression of it leaves a taste in this mouth.  I'd use the "e" word if I didn't think he'd take it as a compliment.

"Listening to music is basically equated with piling up CDs."

"Tepid tastes."

"To express ignorance and to foster it."

"What music is about."

"Attended much more to recent composition and ignored all the mediocrity."

I remember the days when Radio 3 was in the hands of those who thought to "educate people about music."   One listened in vain for a tune and Mozart was thought of as pandering to populism.  The only positive I ever found in Classic FM was as its influence as competition in ending that ridiculous regime. 

You don't need the "composers as philosophers" thread to ask yourself what music is "for".   Have I a duty to educate myself into music that is new to me?  How much of the rest of my life should I spend struggling with discordant strains in the hope of enlightenment?  Why do I enjoy what I currently enjoy?  That is, how did I get to where I am now in current enjoyment of music?

It was through patiently seeking in the less familiar for more of what I was currently enjoying, not through suffering the excruciating.

Here's my analogy.  I have changed from (essentially) pop to classical over my lifetime but retain a love of what to me is the best of the former.  The result is that I only know Paul Simon, Ry Cooder, Joan Amatrading, Bob Dylan and a dozen or so others, even though I know there must be hundreds out there currently as good.  The "problem" is, I never hear them.  It's a loss, yes, but it's a choice I have made. 

This is the result of ghettoising music.  I never hear rock or pop any more.  There is no space or time in my life for it.  It's not a value judgement; it's a fact.   In the same way most young people never hear classical music, and most music lovers never hear new composers' music.  And there' no room for an "ought" in any of this. 

I suggest that what is sneeringly referred to as "stacking up CDs", can for some, involve adding the odd one "on spec".  In this way, and I might add, the free CD that comes with the BBC magazine which I would often not have thought to buy, has broadened the range of what I now enjoy.  I count Messiaen as just such a happy find.  (Well, perhaps "happy" is not the best choice of word here.)

It is not the function of Gramophone (or Radio 3) to "educate" but to inform.  The education is done by the reader/listener for himself or herself if he or she so chooses.  It has something to do with respect for persons, for the recognition and acceptance of an adult's free choice in a time-limited life.  Who should stand in judgement of it?

David has every right to enjoy inflicting discomfort on himself, both physically and musically.  But personally, despite my choice of nickname, I'm happy that we've moved on from the era in which musical quality was equated with painfulness, in which audience members blamed themselves because they found the "important recent composition" which would routinely open a concert to be only a triathlonesque endurance test.  Horlicks is sickly, but battery acid is worse.

I'm particularly curious to know where David stands on Percy Grainger, whom I would have categorised as both a "minor tonal composer" and a practitioner of "dangerous sports" – not merely running between towns while on tour, but lodging a document of explanation with his lawyer in case his S&M activities killed him.

What bothers me about the British classical critical establishment is not the absorption in minor tonal locals – that goes way back and includes the reverence for what my namesake long ago dubbed "cowpat music".  My pet peeve is the uniformity of opinion which comes too close to hype and blows with the wind of fashion.  The Keilberth Ring is In because the Solti Ring is Out, and you can bet money that before long there'll be a cover-splashed Solti Rehabilitation Issue, timed to a Solti Anniversary Edition, etc etc etc.

Good post though, David.

PS I assume the issue you bought wasn't the one in which Philip Clark called the lovely Howard "Horlicks" Hanson "a sententious hack"?