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During the last decade or so, our culture has become compulsive about drawing up lists. Lists of the greatest this and finest that. These are, of course, ludicrous undertakings. They're also completely irresistible. I think it's because in this relativistic age, we secretly crave artistic canons, even in pop culture. As with the British Film Institute's poll of 250 of the world's movie directors and movie critics -- asking them to name the 10 best movies ever. The poll happens once-a-decade, and the new one is just out. The directors and the critics agree than Orson Welles' Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time. But the directors in the poll say that Lawrence of Arabia is at number four. Just as a few years ago, when the 1,500 experts surveyed by the American Film Institute put Lawrence of Arabia at number five. Beautiful-looking, amazing-looking sure, but the 4th or 5th greatest movie of all time? I don't think so. Another parlor game was launched when the publisher Modern Library hired its experts to choose the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. They also let civilians vote online for their favorite 100 novels, which became the most interesting part of the game. Four of the top books on the experts list are by James Joyce and George Orwell. On the popular-vote list six of the top 10 books are by Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard. But that ballot-box-stuffing aside, I actually agree with a lot of the populist preferences, such as the civilians' much higher rankings for Walker Percy and Robertson Davies. In fact, I find that all democratic lists are inherently more interesting than the expert ones, because out of the people's ranking you get a glimpse of the public's quirky tastes instead of one more reprise of the conventional wisdom. As with the 300 favorite classical music pieces chosen every year by the audience of Classic FM, a British radio broadcaster. The canon is here in force -- 22 pieces by Mozart, 17 Beethovens, 10 Bachs, seven Brahmses. But way up at number 13 is a piece called The Ashokan Farewell by the American composer Jay Ungar. And it's on the rise, up from 35 last year and number 100 the year before. Who is Ungar? I recognized his music as soon as I heard it -- from the soundtrack of Ken Burns' Civil War documentary. And no fewer than three scores by the Hollywood composer John Williams are in the top 300 -- Schindler's List at number 61, Harry Potter at 81, and Star Wars at number 83. None of those is especially challenging music or, probably, an enduring work of art. But they are a glass-half-full reminder that despite all the talk about a classical music crisis, there is a huge audience for orchestral music every day in thousands of movie theaters and TV rooms. And the closer I examined the list, the more I realized I was sympathetic to a lot of its populist tilt as well. I love number 117 -- Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, as I do number 46 -- Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. If being in synch with a big dopey "Best Music" popularity list makes me one of the middlebrow hoi polloi, I can live with that. As long as it doesn't mean I have to read L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand. This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.
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