Those were the days?

Hard to believe that, as late as 1981, a comedy show on a major television network could still take for granted the viewer's familiarity with the basic repertory of classical music.

It is tempting to think that, as the saying goes, those were the days.  But were they?  Wasn't there an even earlier time when one's reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was a certificate of being a cultured person?  Weren't there some old geezers still alive in 1981 who whined about the devolution of society in which supposedly cultured people are incapable of spicing up a conversation with a well-timed quote from Homer or Virgil?

Perhaps when I think that "those were the days," what I really mean is that "those were my days," while the earlier and the later days are always someone else's days which are either hopelessly antiquated or depressingly primitive and vulgar...

IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER

The ability of good music to captivate the masses has been sacrificed to ... strained formalism and pretensions to originality...  The composer apparently never made it his goal to pay attention to what the Soviet audience expects from music.

New music has to be music that people love.
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The first of the above quotes comes from the infamous 1936 review (written on Stalin's orders or with his approval) of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of  the Mtsensk District.[1]

The second quote comes from a speech given by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.  Well... not really.  Goebbels probably said similar things about music (the Nazis were studious imitators of Soviet Communism), but he did not make the statement in question.  That statement was made in 2010 by one Deborah Borda who at the time was the President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[2]

As a concise summary of her philistine Stalinist criteria for desirable new music, Borda's statement is of little if any interest.  Totalitarian rhetoric and behavior are ubiquitous in today's America, where individuals and corporations grovel before Facebook lynching mobs and Twitter execution squads, where universities encourage students to think and behave like Brownshirts, and where art organizations have become eager servants of whatever ideology happened to be de jour.