Let me go back to that question again, that I referred to a couple of days ago: "Why Are We Scared of New Music?" It reveals that Radio 3 has a very odd idea of what "music" actually is. Because of course by "music", they actually mean only the "serious" sort of music, the music that is offered as the successor music to the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc. Nobody is very scared of the latest offering from the Sugarbabes. Is that not "music" also? Of course it is. Radio 3 people, as opposed to regular people people, live in a split musical universe, divided into proper music, and Sugarbabe rubbish music that is music of a sort, if you like that sort of thing, but isn't real music, proper music, musical music.

What's going on here? And why, to repeat the original observation, is "new music" so much more disliked and ignored than new art (i.e. visual art) and new literature.

Or to put it another way, why has this bizarre distinction between "new music" and pop music persisted, when literature and the visual arts have seen the boundaries between the High and the Popular become blurred to the point where High is just as much popular as high, and Popular ditto? What has been different about music?

Here's another of my suggested-but-not-sure see-what-you-think answers.

Briefly, the problem has been (A) that "classical music" is so damned good; (B) that "classical music" had to be performed, and (C) that "classical music" has had to be recorded.

Start with (A). Western classical music is not just ordinarily successful art. It has been overwhelmingly successful. It is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And although most of it was written before electronic recording and microphones and CDs and even radio broadcasting were ever thought of, the way it is produced, with what the pop people call "accoustic" instruments has persisted.

This is (B) because of the very nature of music. Once a painting or a sculpture is done, it's done. You need careful owners and museum curators, but no further creative effort is needed from anybody. To realise how different this is from music, imagine a world in which Leonardos had constantly to be, so to speak repainted by contemporary artists, before we could enjoy them. You can see how this activity would cut into the creative time of these same artists. The whole balance of the painting profession would shift towards to dead past and away from the living present, and leaving "modern" art to either a coterie of insignificant self-styled successors to Leonardo who frankly didn't register much, and to an equally insigniticant, in terms of cultural grandeur and prestige, pop art "industry", which would of course nowadays be rooted in photography, the visual equivalent of twentieth century electronic sound technology.

Recording has (C) further intensified this difference.

What the recording of classical music did was further to yank the balance of power within the music-making profession away from the here and now and back to the dead and gone. If you were a composer living and working in about 1960, you had to be a mighty important composer (Stravinsky? Britten? Shostakovitch?) to be regarded as a more significant musical personality than Herbert von Karajan, the top dog conductor of that time. And this despite the fact that Karajan composed hardly a single note of music himself and spent his entire life performing pieces by other composers, most of them dead.

It was recording that made Karajan such a significant figure. It was his huge catalogue of recordings that made him the enormous musical force that he was.

But now the job of recording all the classics is done, and this bizarre interlude of musical history, when the most important "high art" musical activity was not composing music but recording that which had already been composed, is now over, and something like normality is now able to re-assert itself.

But the form in which this re-assertion is occurring is that this split, between the high and the low, the posh and the pop, has been pretty much resolved and negotiated almost out of existence, still lingers in music, and is only now being seriously tackled. Sir Simon Rattle, Karajan's successor at the Berlin Philharmonic, cannot have the cultural centrality of Karajan, because all those recordings of Beethoven symphonies and concertos and Mahler symphonies and song cycles have now all been made. Rattle goes through the same motions eagerly enough, but it can't possibly pack the same cultural punch, which means that discussions like this one, about "why people are scared of new music", take on a sudden new intensity. When Karajan was in his pomp, it didn't matter. It was enough that people flocked to buy recordings of the old music. Now, it does matter. I already have many sets of the Beethoven symphonies. I refuse to pay full price for yet another set, even if it is by Sir Simon Rattle. I might pay £20 for this set. £50? Forget it.

In my earlier posting, I pointed out that people who go to classical concerts are expected to sit still and listen, and this pisses them off. But where did this rule come from in the first place? It is not carved in stone that to listen to an orchestra play Mozart you have to be sitting still and not saying anything. How come this archaic rule still persists? It's because only now have classical concerts lost their cultural pre-eminence. In the days of Karajan and his Berliners, the audience was glad to sit in silence, as if in a cathedral. Now, it's the Okay Philharmonic conducted by Sir George Not-Half-Bad (but not a patch on Karajan), so now the rules start to feel wrong. The audience starts to grumble and shuffle and yawn and say: why are we bothering with this? The musicians retaliate with "new music", which this time has to do well, and this time, since it's no longer Karajan or some such grand figure fixing the audience with his beady eye and telling them to sit still and listen, the audience doesn't want to sit still for and listen to any longer. To hell with it. Suddenly, we're back in the world of Mozart, where the servants made music and the audience weren't even willing to stop chattering. Pop music, from the time of the Strauss family onwards, has never not been like this. Yet the institutions of "serious" music-making are only now beginning to adapt to this extreme mismatch between form and content.

And that, ladies and gentlemen of the culture-sphere, is my story for today. It's a story of delayed action. Problems which other arts have solved decades ago, are being seriously confronted by musicians for the first time only now. No wonder the musicians are baffled by and envious of the other arts. No wonder they say: Why us? What's wrong with music? My answer is that they are the victims of the past successes of those decomposing composers. Only now are the Living Dead of classical music settling back in their graves, to leave "new music" to the living.

That's part of the story anyway. As always with Art, the full truth is always far more complicated and elusive than any one short essay can possibly make it seem. But as what the mathematicians call a "first approximation", my story is better, I submit, than most.