Yeah I've considered all that but still you were making a concrete historical claim about a specific time and place and I was wondering if it's true. I still am.
Of course live music was how people accessed music, and generally for this time in most parts of europe we have a strongly attested art music tradition enjoyed by the aristocratic minority and a separate, vastly more popular yet barely attested folk music tradition associated with the lower class rural majority.
The elite wrote about the things that interested them, and their writings make up the vast majority of primary documents from the era. We have to be careful not to accidentally consume their biases along with their information.
Of course live music was how people accessed music, and generally for this time in most parts of europe we have a strongly attested art music tradition enjoyed by the aristocratic minority and a separate, vastly more popular yet barely attested folk music tradition associated with the lower class rural majority.
The elite wrote about the things that interested them, and their writings make up the vast majority of primary documents from the era. We have to be careful not to accidentally consume their biases along with their information.