IB: I think that I've been pushed slightly into a corner. I don't want to say that all pop music is rubbish and unworthy of being listened to. There is some music that I listen to that I like from various periods of the 20th century. But what I find a lot at the moment is this pressure to have to like it, a cultural sine qua non, and the centrality of it. Other music isn't taken seriously, and people think that classical music is something stuffy and not worthy of respect, and the chattering classes, as it were, are not prepared to learn or know about it. It's lost its authority.

In some ways, it's dreadful that someone has to like something because it makes them a cultured person, but it does represent a fracturing of the culture, compared to the 19th century when people felt that in order to be cultured people they had to know about the latest music.

DJ: But didn't previous periods have similar debates? Lots of people hated Wagner for example, and didn't regard his work as legitimate, instead thinking that it was a terrible wrong turning. And even people who adored Wagner, like Nietzsche, eventually turned against him, deciding that this was something really rather corrupting. And if you go back further, then you could argue that there were similar debates at the time of the Reformation between the new, very simple, Protestant style and the old Catholic polyphonic style. But this is more than just an argument about musical styles, isn't it? It's about the whole status of music.

TB: It is, and it's also in large measure a debate about what music written in the classical tradition actually is. It's a relatively recent invention - the idea that there was a classical convention and that works written in the past should be played reverentially. That is a late 18th-century development. Until then, all music was regarded as music there to be played once or twice and then forgotten. A lot of Mozart's music was written in that way, and he wasn't writing for posterity. He was writing for an immediate audience. Looking at the example of Italian opera in the early to middle years of the 19th century, the idea was that Donizetti or Bellini would write an opera, it would be performed that season and then it would be forgotten. They'd then write another one for the next season.

What we think of as classical music, whether it's Mozart, Bellini or whatever, wasn't regarded by its consumers as being classical music. It was regarded as being music which they enjoyed and which they responded to immediately. That is a real difference. And then, increasingly, in the 19th century with the sacralisation of music, it was plucked out of its recreational and representational context and elevated into being something which should be or could be worshipped for itself, and the idea of a classical canon develops. Then I think the divide between music which is consumed for the moment and then discarded, and music which is approached reverentially in the concert hall or opera house, does develop, and continues to the present day.