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The death of classical music is often announced. Symphony orchestras are white-tied, tailcoated relics of an era gone, their sound world is remote to the young, iPods don’t do Wagner. So the argument goes. Rubbish, of course. The evidence is all around. As one obvious example think of the enthusiasm of audiences that greeted the brilliant players of Gustavo Dudamel’s Venezuelan Youth Orchestra at the Proms and in Edinburgh. They were the stars of the summer, and they demonstrated that live music in the classical tradition is still a liberating sound, still capable of all the old power.

Spending part of the last year journeying through our musical history for BBC Radio 4 and for a book I’ve written, The Making of Music, I’ve been reminded of how that legacy still lives and why it still inspires. In the grip of a celebrity culture, where worth is so often measured simply at the supermarket till or in the size of the tabloid spread, we all need to remind ourselves of where worth lies – in conviction and persistence. Above all, in talent.

How wearisome it is to hear the argument about access and “elitism” posed as if the broadening of the audience and the pursuit of excellence were opposites, or should be. It is the most destructive of arguments, setting those who care about quality against those who care about artistic freedom and a certain kind of democracy, as if they were enemies when they are usually the same people.

It remains something of a mystery why a football fan is not considered elitist in asserting that, in general, Arsenal play better football than Accrington Stanley. It is possible to compare them, and come to a conclusion. Excellence is what matters, and the reason why doors to concert halls and opera houses should be opened wider is so that the message can be shouted more loudly. More people should be encouraged to make their minds up. Music isn’t there to be lapped up by some supine audience like a doctor’s potion; it is there to be tasted and assessed, and no one who cares about it should avoid the responsibility of making a judgment.

The visceral thrill of live music comes in part from the relish of a player or a singer or an orchestra for performance, and also from the challenge to an audience to consider what it has heard. Did they pull it off? If there is a threat to the place of serious music in the future it comes not from the possibility of composers ceasing to compose – they won’t, for better or worse – but from a dilution of that excitement. If orchestras don’t adapt, if concert halls and opera houses don’t find ever more ingenious ways of competing against other attractions, they will wither on the vine.

Dark days come, like the one in May 2007 that brought the end of EMI, a titan of the recording industry. It began at the end of the 19th century as the Gramophone and Typewriter Company and is now in the hands of an equity firm and probably on its way to Hollywood, there to end up as a piece of a bigger corporate jigsaw, where it will take its chance with a studio, a TV company or a sprawling media empire. The smaller recording companies are doing a magnificent job in bearing the responsibility that’s been thrust on them, but when a great tree falls, the ground shakes.

This was the company that, in the 1950s, with Decca, preserved on disc the performances of a generation for an audience that will stretch far into the future. When Walter Legge recorded Maria Callas in Norma, or Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s Choral Symphony at Bayreuth, or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, he was bequeathing a legacy that will not fade.

Like John Culshaw’s first studio recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, for Decca, from 1958, these discs are the precious reminders of performances that should be allowed to shimmer in the mind for years. They catch for ever a moment of poignant grief, or laughter, or an orchestral pause of trembling excitement.

We all remember the moments. I sat once in the early 1980s in the very back row of the amphitheatre – the gods – at Covent Garden, with my back against the wall, to watch a production of Verdi’s Otello, with Plácido Domingo in the title role and Margaret Price as Desdemona. The conductor was Carlos Kleiber, who would come down from his mountain-top only a few times a year, for a performance to which he felt committed. He came into the pit, gave a curt bow, raised his arms and we were off: the opening storm and Otello’s first cry of “Esultate!” carrying us away.

At the end, more than three hours later, I remember sitting still against the wall in a kind of trance. What was it that had caused that particular conductor, on that particular night, to forge that golden pact with the orchestra? They’d played it often before; everyone knew the score. What had happened? None of us can know the answer, which is how it should be.

Music involves mystery. Yet composers are real people. They work, they struggle; they’re sometimes cantankerous and jealous and they aren’t always nice to their friends. Let’s not imagine that music emerges in some holy stream from a sacred mountain, flowing towards a temple where devotees can drink and be cleansed. It is real, sometimes a balm and sometimes an irritant, a cause of solace but something that can also rouse you to anger or despair. Above all, music is the product of human inspiration, a force that’s engaged with the world around us.

Sometimes musical people are tempted to cut themselves off. They are irritated by a culture that seems to devalue the original and the new, or they feel easier in the company of those who share their insights and tastes. Just like those who refuse to open their ears to music they don’t know, or denigrate the classical tradition because of some imagined “snobbery”, they’re undermining the spirit that needs to be preserved. Prejudice and pig-headedness have to be abandoned. Religions preach humility (though some don’t practise it), and music does the same.

I was struck once when talking to the pianist András Schiff about a cycle of Beethoven sonatas on which he had just launched. He spoke of how important the audience was to him, how he would sit in the hall the night before a concert to take the measure of it and how, at the start of a recital, he would regard the playing of the first note as the moment when the crucial engagement was made with the listeners. Without that connection, and the knowledge that a current was passing between them, all was lost.

He also spoke about his beliefs. As a Hungarian Jew, he left Austria in the 1990s in protest against a particular right-wing lurch and eventually became a British citizen. He talked with feeling about the importance of his politics. As he showed me out of his house he gestured towards two grand pianos side by side in the room where he worked. He put his hand on one of them – an elegant old instrument – and seemed to offer it a gesture of love. “That,” he said, “was Furtwängler’s piano.” There was a moment’s silence: Wilhelm Furtwängler, the stern denizen of Bayreuth and Berlin, who had stayed (controversially) in Germany through the Hitler years, never giving the Nazi salute but shaking hands with the Führer, was remembered here, with awe and humility.

That shared feeling is the gift of music. It is powerful precisely because it is not abstract, living in a distant sphere, but speaks of people and their sensibilities. The European tradition is only part of this history of music-making, which took different paths elsewhere, but it is one of the great stories, springing from our history. Without it we would live more impoverished lives, and it isn’t fanciful to say that we need it. That is why composers and listeners are participants in music. Each needs the other.

It is quite easy at a dull concert, or at some trumped-up show that is all about style, to sink into gloom. Will the next generation want to sit in front of an orchestra in white tie and tails? Will the iPod generation simply find too much to listen to elsewhere? Yet this generation has also an ear that is tuned to innovation, boldness, risk. Composers and performers have always adapted, never stopped learning, and have never lost the urge to make music. There is no reason at all to suppose that in our time, uniquely, that commitment will disappear. It survives.

James Naughtie’s The Making of Music: A Journey with Notes is published next Thursday by John Murray, £20

Buy the book for £18 (including p&p)

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