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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: Kate Guthrie, "The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain" (U California Press, 2021)
Description: From the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music have been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. The goal of these initiatives was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience but to teach a particular way of listening that would help the public "appreciate" music.In The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain (University of California Press, 2021), Dr. Kate Guthrie examines for the first time how and why music appreciation has had such a defining and long-lasting impact—well beyond its roots in late-Victorian libe...