I need to respond to that posting of Greg's myself, because I think he is asking the wrong questions altogether.
What a load of utter rubbish that Sandow piece is. Funny that he doesn't have a comments section, innit?
"Relevance" is one of the critic buzzwords that make me want to hit things, very hard (see also: "elitism", "ticket prices" and "why aren't 20-somethings interested in Mozart piano concertos").
To each his own, but the opera Death in Venice speaks to me directly in so many ways that Visconti's ghastly film or Mann's book doesn't that I couldn't catalogue them all here. And why is that?--because of Britten's "searing, passionate and profound music" (said by a BBC presenter after a live relay of Birtwistle's Mrs. Kong).
It's the *music* that goes places no words or visuals could ever hope to go. As the character of Lord Risley says in the movie version of Forster's Maurice "Music is the highest of the arts--it needs no reference to the figurative or the corporeal".
In other words, music is relevant to me if I think it's good, full stop. I don't give a toss about when it was written or *shudder* if has any political content *shudder*. You either "get" a piece or you don't and I resent being told that I should feel guilty for liking Nixon in China and thinking it was a fine evening in the theatre.
Opera does some things fantastically well and other things abysmally. So does every other art form (movies are very poor in depecting people's inner emotional lives, for example) and I think it's pathetic to criticize an art form for it what it supposedly doesn't do well instead of what it does.
The only ArtsJournal blogs that have comment sections are the ones that have migrated to TypePad. Drew McManus now has comments enabled; he did not before Adaptistration moved, for example.
That said, yeah, who cares about "relevance"? 
I care about 'relevance'. Absolutely, you can enjoy (I have done) Nixon in the theatre and that is all well and good and nothing to feel guilty of. But there's no reason (especially not if it is to be exalted in that ghastly phrase to 'the highest of the arts') that music can't actually do more than make your heart sing for an hour or two. A good meal can do that. I see no reason why we should be afraid of the idea that music just might actually pass from the concert hall into real life and enrich people's lives in ways that are more than just sensual pleasure, admiration, spiritual exaltation, as wonderful as these things might be.
There's an elephant in the corner attitude about classical music that might explain its continued demise - hardly anyone is prepared to talk about how this stuff actually does enrich people's lives beyond the way in which a football match might enrich their lives. Literature, film, pop music, jazz, theatre, art, they are happy to confront this, and people who enjoy these things take it for granted that there is something about all of these things that teaches them something about the world, about human experience. Why can't we accept that music can (does, if you listen) do the same thing. It's not about specific political messages (this is where I might differ from Greg Sandow, I think). Think about what Picasso can show you about space, or Matisse about colour, or Monet or Rembrandt about light. Then, think about what Feldman, Cage, Messiaen, Mozart show us about time; what Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky show us about form. What all great music shows us about memory, about how things sit in relation to one another. Don't think about it if you wish - I do a lot of the time, but when I do, the breathtaking thing about the best music is that all of this is there, waiting to give you something more, and at that point the music actually does change your life. And why wouldn't you want that?
Should be 'I don't a lot of the time', four lines up.
All of that is fine and I agree, Tim. It's not at all what Greg was talking about when he mentioned The Sopranos, though. He was talking about something much more literal and much less interesting.
(That's my anonymous posting above; apologies. I did NOT mean it to be anonymous.)
I agree, Lisa, if I'm reading Sandow's post correctly, although note that this isn't the one I linked to originally (which should be the one titled 'Content'). By the second post he was talking about classical music's inability to speak to the present day (in broad terms - Lulu, for example, is admissible). I absolutely agree that a literal 'all opera must be about last week's news' approach is daft, and a recipe for bad art, but I'm not sure that Greg's second post is advocating that. A big post on what I mean by all this is coming up, and I'd love to hear Greg's comments himself.
I should read Greg's second posting. I am way behind.
Don't think about it if you wish - I do a lot of the time, but when I do, the breathtaking thing about the best music is that all of this is there, waiting to give you something more, and at that point the music actually does change your life. And why wouldn't you want that?
I've had my life changed a number of times by music, I never looked at the world the same way again--the one I remember most vividly was hearing King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man for the first time and after it ended, just staring at the speakers on my stereo in disbelief that music could be like *that*. My Black Sabbath records never sounded quite the same after that (see also: Tristan, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Reimann's amazing opera Lear, maybe a few others). They changed my life in that music is by about the distance from where I'm sitting to the Orion Nebula the most important thing in my life--it changed how I thought about the most important thing in my life and so that's why it was "life changing".
Thing is though, I'm far more interested in the "How" of music ("wow! that E7#9b5b6 chord followed the Bm#11#9no7!" "Ooooh, notice how Schreker combined celesta, harmonium, double harps and divisi strings there!") than the "Why", but that's what I think when I contemplate time and form, "How", not how it relates to non-musical events. I mean, there's a section that lasts about 20 seconds in the prelude to Schreker's glorious Die Gezeichneten, it's about 2:30 in, that just slays me every. single. time. I hear it--I'm utterly and completely transported in that 20 seconds, the outside world ceases to exist; it's very much like LSD experiences I've had. It doesn't tell me anything about life or anything, but it tells me acres about the art of orchestration and post-Tristan chromatic harmony. It's why I'd rather read books disecting the tone rows of Lulu than books about the mysteries of music and how it fits in to our lives.
As far as "relevance" in the Sandowian, marketing sense how about this: this is really good music, give it a try? That worked for me when I bought my first classical album. I often get the sense that when the British talk about "relevance" in terms of classical music (yes, I know Sandow is a fellow Yank), what they really mean is "How do we justify expenditures by the Arts Council to the taxpayer".
enrich people's lives beyond the way in which a football match might enrich their lives
Everton won last weekend, for only the 2nd time this season, climbing out of the relegation zone in the process and I guarantee you, that enriched my life in a big way.
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