Hows this for a controversial angle:

The working class invents music and the middle class takes responsibility for making sure it doesn't slip into obscurity ...

I wonder what the original blues men and folk singers and jazzers and medieval monks would have thought of middle class connoisseurs of their music?

We can thank the middle classes for the continuaton of these traditions as well as opera and ballet.

Remember that by the end of the 18th century, the middle class had taken over from the aristocracy as the market for these artforms too.

I don't think relevance has anything to do with it.