I was pondering some of what was said in this thread recently and wondering if the fact of where I grew up made it somehow more possible for me to appreciate Mozart than someone who grew up in an urban hellscape. Not just because of my class (as Luka says, I'm on the lower end of middle class, and a lot of people who grew up in London, say, would be as or more well off than I was), but because of the landscape. Open fields, gently rolling hills, clear blue skies, stars at night - some might say a banal landscape, certainly not a hive of cultural activity, but a place where a sort of pre-modern romanticism can still flourish. And what was said in this thread (can't remember by who) - Mozart's music, or any pre-modernist classical music, is about harmony, unbroken melodies, structure, cycles. A slower pace of life. Perhaps I'm able to believe in peacefulness and serenity more than somebody who rarely saw an unimpeded horizon growing up, somebody surrounded by constant advertising, traffic, litter, homelessness, crime, etc.
Is 'soul' antipathetic to urbanity, in particular? (And has the internet made city-dwellers of us all?)
Yes and yes. Turkish classical music could never go fully atonal for instance because of the way it doesn't use counterpointt and its compositional structure involving more quartertonal and smaller steps. It's a heavily monophonic melodic music. yet its almost non-existent now and any attempt to revive it would be utterly quixotic. I also think Hindustani classical is a bigger thing in the west than it is in the streets of Delhi or Calcutta.