Those who don’t like classical music think it’s boring because they expect it to be boring.

Why do they expect it to be boring? Because those who do like classical music want it to be boring and try everything in their power to make it that way.

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Being bored attending a concert is essentially a cathartic experience. A member of an older generation wants the concert to be boring because he wants to be able to disconnect from our culture. He wants a confrontation with something disconnected from the sordid now, something older and something difficult to understand. But he also does not want to understand it.

Undergoing an hour or two of entertainment where are you not entertained, where you are bored stiff, is a choice and a sacrifice, but it is a potent way to register complaint with alternative forms of entertainment that you don’t approve of. In some ways, after an hour or two of something you did not understand, you feel you’ve paid penance for allowing yourself to be inundated and even sometimes amused by modern entertainment. For every binge of pop culture, you purge with some classical.

But it is all a delusion. We think listening to Katy Perry is being mindlessly disengaged and listening to some long 19th century piece is being mentally stimulated. But the exact opposite is true: the very fact that you can recognize that Katy Perry is mindless entertainment means you have, on some level, engaged with the music enough to recognize something is wrong. Exactly how are you engaging with the Brahms 1st piano concerto? At any given moment during the concert, you could not tell me where you were in the form or structure of the piece; you could not tell me what the cultural connotations at the time would have been; you could have given me only the vaguest description of what Brahms was trying to accomplish in this or that measure, assuming you were awake and paying attention. But let’s face it: how much of the concert are you actually paying attention to the music?

Do you even know what it means to pay attention to the music? What are you supposed to be paying attention to? What are you even supposed to listen for? How do you find out what to listen for?

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Listening to classical music is, for many people, the most selfish aesthetic activity of their aesthetic lives. It isn’t done out of a love of the music, but out of a love of the feelings the music produces in you. These feelings may be feelings of orgasmic pleasure, which self-proclaimedly was true of the early French audiences of Wagner’s operas, or it may be the cathartic act of boring yourself, or feelings of the numinous and the spiritual for people who don’t understand either, or the sort of music that awakens sexual discontent in love-starved, middle-aged women. Sometimes, ironically, classical music even inspires the most exhilarating feeling of all, the knowledge that you are superior because you imagine yourself to be listening to music for its own sake, and not for the feelings it produces in you.

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Once I happened to be at a dinner in the better part of Scottsdale, and the wife of a famous recently-retired newspaper editor asked me to play Clair de Lune on the piano. During a particularly emotional part, she leaned over to my mom, groaned, and said, “Oh, this piece is better than sex.” (My mother, apparently, didn’t know quite where to go with the conversation at this point.) The observation, however, was on some level a trenchant one: this woman was engaging with the music enough to at least be aware of its purpose. Debussy would probably be happy to know that this lady most likely represents the largest demographic of listeners to Clair de Lune.

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There are three sorts of musicians—players, composers, and critics. A musician is all of them.

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There is only one solution to all our problems: we must change the audience into musicians. They must become themselves players, composers, and critics.

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Everyone is trained to read. Everyone is trained to write. Not everyone becomes a writer. Not everyone reads for a living.

So too it used to be with music. Was it coincidence that it used to be that way in the cultures that produced Praetorius, Schütz and Bach?