Many of the questions I shall attempt to answer in this final chapter are quite general questions about the value of works of art and how we attribute that value, although some of the questions arise in a more acute and pressing form for music. But before we consider these perhaps there is an even more general question we should consider. Why, you might ask, do we need to make judgements of the relative value of pieces of music at all? After all, doesn't the whole thing smack of university league tables, of Sir John Lubbock's hundred best books and so on? (The question, of course, arises for the other arts as well.)

There is a short answer but perhaps it ought to be prefaced with the observation that talk of “value” is a little odd here. Its use is, I suspect, just one of the many ways in which a materialist culture infiltrates areas where it is manifestly inappropriate. For outside philosophy, it is used mainly to indicate monetary value. It is largely used to signal the price that a sculpture or a painting might get in the auction room. In the world of music, nobody much says that this or that symphony is a work of great value. Instead we talk in terms that suggest a less precise business of comparing stature. Some pieces of music are great, some mediocre, some engaging but transient and some poor and so on.