“We write symphonies,” President Trump proclaimed on July 6 during a speech in Warsaw.

When this curious quotation first circulated among music lovers, it seemed a bit baffling coming from a leader who had not previously evinced much affection for the classical repertoire. Alas, taken in context, Mr. Trump’s point was all too clear and dismaying.

He was asserting that Western culture is fighting forces of “radical Islamic terrorism” bent on testing our resolve; he questioned whether the West has the “will to survive” the onslaught. During one riff, Mr. Trump extolled the richness, history and, indeed, the superiority of Western culture. “We write symphonies,” he proudly proclaimed, as if to prove his point.

Many commentators seized on the line as a clue to the president’s thinking, his “white-nationalist dog-whistling,” as Jonathan Capehart, a columnist at The Washington Post, bluntly put it.

But the president’s smug invocation of the Western symphonic heritage also pressed a sore spot for me as a music critic. Nothing impedes the appreciation of classical music — and keeps potential listeners away — more than the perception that it is an elitist art form, that composers throughout history, and their aficionados today, uniformly consider it the greatest, loftiest and most ingenious kind of music. Few classical music fans, in my experience, argue that the Western symphonic repertory stands apart from or atop music of other cultures, or other types of Western music.