Opposition between classical and modern music
In modern culture there is a commonly held view that classical or academic music is much more perfect and advanced than any other music which is not serious and may be listened to by lower classes, unsophisticated masses of people. But such contradiction is too narrow and is not true to life. The selection of a certain musical language in no way guarantees the fullness and richness of the artistic statements. This means that even a symphony may be superficial and primitive, and jazz or rock may turn out to be able to solve difficult aesthetic problems and exert great emotional influence on humans. In one or another form the opposition of the high and the low always existed in art: thus the musical culture of the eighteenth century was primarily represented by church music, and a comic opera or a dance suite were considered to be the "lower" type of music. A more considerable gab between the academic music and the music for entertainment in the twentieth century is connected with a whole range of different reasons: the cultural globalization led to the expansion of non-European musical tradition into the European cultural space, drastic changes in the social and economic arrangement greatly widened the audience of popular music by taking it away from the musical folklore that reigned among the widest strata of society for centuries. Anyway, the increasing number of musical "purists" that recognize only classical music is confronted by the increase of the supporters of all other types of music that in some cases has developed into much more than just entertainment.