Art & Creativity Quote by Sun Ra

Sun Ra’s line lands like a sly budget report disguised as a cultural critique: symphonic music doesn’t just exist in a neutral realm of “high art,” it’s underwritten and therefore steered. By saying “sponsored,” he shifts the conversation from taste to power. The orchestra becomes less a timeless temple of beauty and more a funded institution with donors, boards, and gatekeepers deciding what gets played, preserved, and prestigious.

“Upper structures of society” is classic Sun Ra phrasing: cosmic but pointed. He avoids naming “the rich” or “the elite” in blunt terms, choosing a phrase that suggests architecture - a hierarchy with load-bearing beams. The subtext is that symphonic music’s modern identity is inseparable from class stratification, and that its aura of refinement is maintained by the same social scaffolding that keeps other forms of music labeled “popular,” “street,” or “primitive.” It’s not an attack on musicianship; it’s an audit of cultural legitimacy.

Context matters: Sun Ra built a parallel universe to the mainstream, running a band like a self-sustaining myth-machine, pressing his own records, staging performances that refused assimilation. Coming from jazz - a tradition repeatedly mined, underpaid, and then academically “rescued” - he recognizes how institutions sanitize living art. The jab isn’t that symphonic music is fake; it’s that its survival strategy is patronage, and patronage always comes with a preferred narrative.