I think it is relevant to people who are interested in it, just like other things in life. There is certainly no point for everyone to embrace it.
The thing that bugs me a bit is the amount of times it is used in the commercials, kind of loses sense afterall and the sound becomes overly associated with something irrelevant.

Classical music, as far as I'm concerned, is really the basis of all music. Learn to play classical and you will never have any restrictions as a musician, technically speaking. I always found it interesting how a lot of the old-school metal carried a lot of classical appeal to it - Bach, in particular. Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Fugue in G minor. I can't help thinking about Ozzy Osbourne's Mr. Crowly when I listen to either of those classical pieces.

I like music from many idioms, indeed I came here to talk about Persian pop, but I look to Western Classical music as The Elite World Tradition, as shown by the participation of elites in all other major cultures. The finest of it like all great Art stands the test of interrogation, e.g. when I played a rock musician friend a Shostakovich prelude it showed up that he was using less than 10% of his options for modulation and in a recent Strictly Come Dancing Dancing (Dances With Stars) two very competent dancers couldn't cope with the changes of accent in Prokofiev's Knights' dance - a relatively accessible piece.

Don't get me wrong. The BEST thing about music is that nearly all of us can get enjoyment from it at some level, but there also has to be a Gold Standard otherwise there is no striving for higher and higher ideals.

Yeah, but what the gold standard is to some is very different to others. Personally, I don't really care for virtuosity if it's used pretentiously, which is my main problem with band geeks at school and some metal. Take a thrash metal shredder for instance. When I hear that for like two minutes, all I can think of is some loser metal burnout sitting in his mom's basement doing air guitar along with it. Orchestral gives the image of some snobby musicians talking about music theory and how rock bands are talentless because they don't know it.

Take Throbbing Gristle for example. Their music is generally seen as gold in sense of industrail and post-punk. To a classical music listener, most of the time it's regerded as complete trash.

The standard changes with the listener. I enjoy a lot of kinds of music, and yeah, I can appreciate some classical. I wouldn't go out of my way to listen to it (right now at least), but I also listen to artists like Merzbow and Sunn O))) that may not be seem as musically... good to most.

What if Sunn O))) did a show but were all smug about it, would that affect how much you like them?

Their robes come off as pretty smug to me. Pretentious ****ers.

I heard Stephen O'Malley has a pretty snobby attitude about punk bands too.

Quite punchable.

http://www.ideologic.org/media/filte...en_omalley.jpg

It depends I guess. I don't really care if he likes punk or not. The music is cool to me, and however they got their influence isn't important.

I guess what it really boils down to is your attitude and definition of music. I kinda don't like it when people think music is just one thing. Like the more complex the musician the better they are. But there's also complexity in layering music, and having a bunch of cool stuff happening at once. Whether these people have had extensive musical education or not isn't important, as long as what they're playing makes sense to THEM.

You're all out to get me aren't you?