music created and participated in by all- something that had always been inherent in previous cultures

It wasn't. The biggest distinction has always been by gender - almost all cultures have different song repertoires for men and women, and instruments that only one gender plays. Others have instruments or pieces of music reserved for a priestly elite, or for ethnic minorities, or for groups of social outcasts. This kind of distinction goes back to the Palaeolithic. No woman would have played a didgeridoo or a bullroarer in Australia for 50,000 years. And songs for men's initiation rites have only been performed out of women's earshot in all cultures for all human history.

The ways the rights to perform and listen to music have been divided up have always been as complicated as any society can manage. In the anthropological picture, modern Western culture is not unusually stratified.