There's nothing new in any civilization about the upper classes studying and venerating art and music. What was new was the emergence of large middle classes an

There's nothing new in any civilization about the upper classes studying and venerating art and music. What was new was the emergence of large middle classes and a very rapid, peculiarly pervasive adoption of the piano in particular. It may have started in Continental Europe, but as far as I can tell it was through Victorian England that it spread across the globe--directly through the British Empire, but also indirectly through the U.S. and then, especially in Asia, Japan. We're not talking electronic keyboards, but a large and expensive musical instrument which might cost as much as all the other furnishings in a house combined. It was usually upright pianos, which were cheaper and could sit against a wall, but still a major purchase. Today you're much more likely to find electronic keyboards in homes, which even at the higher end are still a much smaller purchase for middle-class incomes, yet you probably[citation needed] would not find them in nearly as many homes as pianos in their heyday. Pianos are extremely functional instruments and in many respects ideal for learning music, but that alone doesn't even begin to explain their popularity, nor the popularity of piano music lessons. Different countries had their own local dynamics. The Mandarin system built up a type of middle class culture (even if the middle class itself was never very big) throughout much of East and SE Asia, making formal study of classic art and literature a virtue for non-elites, including the poor, whether or not a family could actually afford an education. Japan never adopted the Mandarin system (class hierarchy too deep and rigid), but the Meiji Restoration accomplished much the same in making virtues of the Japanese intelligentsia part of a new middle class culture. So these cultures in particular were already primed for the piano-as-modern-middle-class-status-symbol wave when industrialization exploded their middle classes. And perhaps this is why the violin and classical Western music in general also saw relatively strong adoption--because classical music was already held in esteem by the masses, and much of that esteem simply shifted to Western classical music. (By contrast, in American and some European cultures much more emphasis seems to have been placed on women learning the piano. And dynamics such as the Protestant work ethic tend to moderate mass adoption of elite norms which aren't immediately practical or beneficial.) In any event, my point was just that this experience wrt piano lessons which are strongly encouraged and even demanded by parents has been shared (indistinguishably so, and for nearly indistinguishable reasons) by many millions of families all across the world, including in the U.S., where it approached something approximating a universal experience among the middle-class--actually taking lessons, or at least understanding that it was something you were supposed to be doing. It's just that most of those experiences outside Asia and the Asian diaspora occurred in earlier generations. The differences lay in how and when different communities arrived at that cross-cultural nexus, and how they moved away from it, if they did at all.