I've kept my playing private until now because I didn't feel ready to give a performance commensurate to my ambitions and self-image; in plain English I wasn't good enough to think about publically airing my stuff. (Especially because in today's media-saturated environment, we hear Aaron Rosand and Heifetz tracks as TV background tracks, and I don't want to sound like an amateur.)

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Anyway, concerning the subject of this thread, German music isn't subsidized because of the church or for religious reasons.

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No, because the government gave Pierre Boulez what amounts to his own government ministry and a third of the entire national cultural budget, which he used to build a mad-scientist underground fortress (seriously) for research into ugly music that no-one likes. On the other hand, guys like Steve Reich, John Adams, and Phillip Glass are successes at the more refined levels of pop culture, and Canada's Marjan Mozetich is writing enjoyable, serious and relevant music.

I think it's far more common for people to have a sincere appreciation for various forms of pop music

Refinement is not the same thing as quality; a lot of pop music is successful because it does exactly what classical music used to do, before it was taken over by the rigor mortis of the concert hall: it aims at an emotional effect that's instantly perceptible and comprehensible. The most powerful contemporary pop music is a kind of meta-art that uses familiar references and images in unfamiliar and compelling ways. (Commercial gangsta rap, for instance, wouldn't make sense outside of a media-saturated environment.) This has made pseudo-classical music out of the less-referential and less-media-dependent pop music of the Boomers, by the way.

I'm not exactly saying that pop music is bad. It's damn tough to survive as a pop musician, because if you're boring you don't have a career. Lots of classical players are totally boring to listen to, and are more afraid of playing a wrong note than of failing to engage the audience. On the other hand, classical training is the royal road to technical mastery, which is why even Jewel went around bragging up her year at Interlochen, and if you are interested in music itself rather than using it like a drug to push your emotional buttons, sooner or later you find your way to classical music or to pre-50's jazz.

Plato says that music is such a potent emotional manipulator that it ought to be regualted by the state. It's pretty obvious that, by that criterion, much of the contemporary performance of classical music is no longer 'music' in this sense at all. That's one reason why conservatory students all love Mahler: because his style is one in which heartfelt expression is permissible and actually mandated by the style. We haven't managed to drain all the juice out of Mahler yet.

This is why I'm wondering if classical-style music can survive in a secular society. It seems you need the church or royal elite that can fund and shape it; that the sorts of patrons you need only come from those sorts of societies.

I'd say that a haute-bourgeois society can also serve the purpose of the individual aristocratic patron. The British middle-class made London one of the most lucrative venues in Europe fifty years before the French revolution. The real question is whether we still have a bourgeois class in the old sense any longer. Snobbishness wasn't entirely a bad thing.

Anyway, questions like 'will classical music survive' don't interest me very much. I don't have faith in institutions, and since my skills place me close to the top of the pile, I don't have any question about my ability to find well-paying work for the rest of my life. It'll survive the way that classical sculpture did into the Hellenic period, and then will change or collapse or be replaced by something we can't presently imagine.

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