As a child Rupert Christiansen spent countless hours in the music collections of public libraries, exploring and listening. “Could a 10-year-old budding maestro – or opera critic – enjoy the same adventure today? Only if he or she was the winner in a postcode lottery. Decent public music collections have become increasingly hard to find in a library structure which has replaced its old mission of humanising and educating in favour of providing value-free dissemination of information. I see the logic in this, but feel impelled to defend my own culture’s corner.”