In matters affecting the future of high culture, it is often difficult to tell the friends of art from its enemies. Art is a shibboleth, an unexamined good in whose service—and in the solving of whose problems—many can prosper. Whether what is good for art’s advocates is in fact also good for art is a murky matter.

These days, the attention of the well-wishers of art is beginning to fasten on the plight of serious music. There are many elements in this plight: a decline in audience sophistication, at once caused by and resulting in an increased concentration on already-known and crowd-pleasing repertory; the complete failure over the past half century of avant-garde composition, both acoustic and electronic, to win a place in the minds of musicians and in the ears of serious music-lovers; the almost total loss of confidence in the idea that the writing of music is a craft requiring fundamental and structured training; a shortage of new performing celebrities perceived to be of historical importance; the continuing encroachment of academic musicology on the standard repertory, an encroachment (in the manner of the killer bees)-now progressing into Beethoven and moving forward in time at the rate of a decade every five years or so; a management revolution in which administrators are replacing practicing musicians as artistic policy makers; and finally the weakening of any future audience through the inability of our society to prescribe a serious course of education for the young in the humanities, including