When I was at school music lessons were exercises in classical music appreciation. I'm afraid that my music teacher was such an unpleasant bully that it put me off classical music for many years and I've spent many years since blindly catching up on a subject I'd like to know more about but for which I lack a reliable guide.

Things move on, both my nephew and my girlfriend's son have been told at various times by their music teachers that opera is elitist. Lessons have been devoted to appreciation of "world" music with the message that it's just as good as western classical forms but that western hegemony means that people are blind to its charms. Recently my girlfriend's son had a class devoted to the appreciation of the singing of contestants on a Simon Cowell-run pop competition programme, "The X-Factor", where amateurs emote and gurn their way through a range of pop standards as part of a public vote.