About forty years ago I was teaching at a small music store.  One day I was practicing while waiting for a student and one of our regular customers came in.  He played in a country music band and was a walking stereotype for the genre.  He stood over me and listened as I played a Spanish piece by Francisco Tarrega.  When I finished he said, "I don't really like classical music but I sure do like that stuff that you play."  That was high praise coming from him.

About twenty years ago I was invited to play at an outdoor summer music festival.  It was a week night and the weather had been awful for a couple of days but it was starting to clear.  The decision to go forward with the program was only made a couple of hours earlier.  There was nearly 450 people in the audience and they seemed to like it a lot.  However every subsequent year I was denied another booking.  When I asked why I was told that my program was too "laid back" and that the community really wanted something more energetic.  So I drove for two hours to attend one of their events that summer.  I saw an amazing jazz quintet playing to an audience of about fifty people.  They were energetic but were playing to a near empty space.

I used to give programs at elementary schools.  I would talk about the guitar and then play some music. And I never "dumbed down" the selections.  Then I would invite the kids to ask questions.  The kids were always well behaved and many of them had some pretty interesting questions.  The teachers were almost always surprised at how interested the kids were in the music.

I have many such stories.  The central theme is that incorrect assumptions are constantly being made about classical music and then used to justify some wayward decisions.  Actually the bigger truth is that most of us do that with a lot of the art that we don't understand.

I don't want to go to a quilt show because a quilt is just a blanket made with scraps.  I don't want to visit a pottery exhibit because if I need a vase I can buy a cheap one at the store.  Opera is just a bunch of fat people screeching in a foreign language.  A custom car or hot-rod show is just boys with their toys.  And I would never go to a poetry reading because today's poets don't even know how to rhyme.  If I want rhyming words I have to go to a hip-hop concert and I'm way too old for that stuff.

Stepping out of our comfort zone is challenging, difficult, and...well...uncomfortable.  But it's  easier if we are with friends who understand and like the form.  They can act as guides and explain what's going on and why one example is better than another.  Kind of like an "art sherpa".

But if we don't at least try we deny ourselves the opportunity to see our world through fresh eyes.  Or to experience new beauty.  We remain in our cocoon free to form erroneous opinions based on incorrect assumptions.