Culture and democracy: these two words are central, separately and in association, both to the discussion of art in our society and to the larger debate about the meaning and the organization of life that has so occupied intellectuals in our time. The current definitions of these crucial terms have proven to be unstable and subject to the changing pressures of politics and the moral upheavals of the present day. As a result, the words culture and democracy themselves are now in danger of becoming unusable if they cannot be rigorously redefined in a way that makes them relevant both to the life of art and to the vitality of our democratic institutions.

It is this making of distinctions in an area so given to their blurring that I shall attempt here, in full consciousness of the hazards involved in redefining terms that so many have used and through which so many vested interests have been created. Culture, in the form of music, has been the work of my life; democracy is the political system under which we live, as well as the political system under which we, in view of the alternatives, would certainly choose to live. For many of us, our lives are in some way dedicated to culture; for us all, our lives are perforce dedicated to democracy. Ours is not the first historical period to notice the standing tension between the existence of culture and the extension of democracy, but ours may well