Last week, the Young Musicians Foundation, a nonprofit organization offering scholarships to thousands of young musicians in the Los Angeles area, announced an eye-catching free concert: “Yeethoven.” Pairing segments of Beethoven’s most readily recognizable works (his “Egmont” overture, his Fifth Symphony, and his String Quartet No. 14) with orchestrated snippets of Yeezus tracks (as arranged by composer/conductor Stephen Feigenbaum), the well-intentioned program made big promises out the gate: “As the concert progresses, music by the two will become increasingly integrated, ultimately resulting in a total mash-up of the two. If you find this concert far-fetched, we invite you to come and listen—see if you can tell where Beethoven ends and Kanye begins.” Reading this and watching the promotional video, I felt myself struggling to decide: Was this simply a bad idea, or a really, really bad idea?

From the available evidence, at least, the concert sounds spectacularly ill-conceived. For one, they chose to arrange snippets from Yeezus, West’s most relentlessly amelodic album made up mostly of digital blasts, blurts, and gasps. The potential material it offers for orchestral arranging, especially when put up against something like Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14—the opening movement of which Wagner once called “surely the saddest thing ever said in notes"—seems pitifully scant. Nothing from Late Registration, which featured the efforts of Jon Brion, an actual arranger? Or from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which featured actual string interludes?

Furthermore, the promo copy refers to 2013’s Yeezus as “Kanye West’s latest album,” suggesting that no one involved in planning this concert Googled West’s name at any point in the last few months. In the promotional clip, we see musicians playing the “fate” motif from the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, followed by horns blaring the Hudson Mohawke sample at the heart of "Blood on the Leaves,” which suggests the level of equivalence Feigenbaum is working with. The only similarity between “Blood on the Leaves” and Beethoven’s Fifth is a minor key and the presence of dotted eighth notes, which would also suggest a strong equivalence between Beethoven’s Fifth and “Turn Down for What.” The entire concert feels as though it stemmed from someone saying "Yeethoven" and giggling. The fact that musicians were hired, a concert program drawn up, and an entire press campaign hatched feels like folly.

I worked at a classical music magazine for a few years, so I am accustomed to the shape and tone of convulsive mini-controversies like this one. They happen more often than you might think, as the most craven instincts of concert programmers trying to lure younger audiences by any means necessary—Debussy Goes Clubbing! “Baby Got Back"… with an orchestra!—runs into the ever-reliable hair-trigger gag reflex of the classical music faithful. The side planning the concert offers weak platitudes about engaging with modern culture, while the side disdaining the concert snorts at mass music culture’s continued plunge into irreversible banality.

As one of the rare (and lonely) critics who has attempted to write about both classical music and rap for mainstream publications, these conversations fill me with a familiar melancholy. They proceed from an irreparable misunderstanding between those who enforce the high/low art binary and those who refuse it. Binary thinkers imagine relativists as people who make no distinctions; relativists look at binary thinkers as people who make only one. Both sides reliably talk past each other and throw up their hands; no one learns anything. Something like Yeethoven is just another squirt of gas on a garbage fire.