I finally had time to read that article "the soundtracking of America" and I agree in general with most of the criticism raised by you all, although I think if there was an effective means of communicating with Afica and Asia from Europe in Beethovens era, i am sure there would not have been cross fertilization of ideas... It would likely just have been the Europeans force feeding their own culture to the rest....as they still try to do today..

His main thrust for me is interesting....- music creates moods and induces merely feelings and emotions, rather then intellectual substance..( at least thats his gist)...he then goes on to argue that even here, music fails .... " we recognise that music claims to unleash emotion at its most primitive, (but) we understand it never will", which in turn has created the rise of irony or "musical ironists" of us all....

1) I agree with most of the first point, in that music of itself , though it can contain intellectual musical thought and ideas, there is no purely non musical intellectual thought dirctly given, ...much like his chess analagy.
2) Most of us can easily dismiss his second theme about it failing to unleash emotion at its most primitive form... Personally , I have been emotionally wiped after seeing a concert such as Arcade Fire at Lees Palace...it is a trancendental primal experience, not to mention musics emotive power in the bedroom, particularly in ones younger years....Clearly Bottum needs to be on the bottom more often.....ok that was bad....

However my beef is this:
If music is emotive rather then intellectual, that does not mean the two things are unrelated...
I think Bottum misses the whole point which is that music, like good film, like good literature supports intellectual thought. It is not in competition with it!

Anne Michaels novel Fuitive Pieces gives insight into todays situation in the middle east that makes literature just as essential a component in the intellectual developement of a perspective on that topic as a non fiction book provides.. Intellectual thought is developed through multiple means and literature and music and film are just some of them...
Who hasen't pondered the death of a friend without music putting you in the right frame of mind to think about mans realtionship to earth, religion , atheism, existentialism, etc... The music is perhaps only a soundtrack to intellectual thought, but without it would the big questions be raised to the surface so effectively? Its support role cannot be underestimated....

He is correct in that lesser music can make us imagine that we must be "having a deep thought because we feel it so". I put this under the guilty pleasure songs that I like... Not all music is significant, some is bubble gum no doubt....but he misses Alan Bloom's (The Closing Of The American Mind) point when he dismissively states that " it turned out to be only rock music that Bloom objected too...he even ended up mildly praising the effects of classical music")

Bloom's point was that a lot of pop music is mindless yet still capable of emotionally moving people easily ...so easily that it leads to a lack of drive for intellectual learning...but some music he correctly notes can be helpfull towards supporting intellectual thought, ie I read it as dont through out the baby with the bathwater...( I read the book decades ago so apologies to Bloom for bastardising his treatise to one badly written sentence, but I thing I have the essence of it.
Bloom is also of a generation that the concept of substantive pop music is beyond him)

Bottums' complaint regarding song lyrics has some merit but again he throws the baby out with the bathwater ...One only needs to hear The Band Played Waltzing Matilda once to get the ESSENCE of the tragic event....Reading newspaper accounts cannot get this close to the event, and hearing it, ( even almost a century after the event occurred, you are immediately there with the troops) , certainly affects ones intellectual position on war and human nature....

Finally I would say that although he raises an intersting topic, he is certainly not thorough and convincing . At one point Bottum states that " music stands fairly low on the traditional list of devices by which we try to understand human experience" ....so who's list is that???? To start an argument with such unsubstantialed bunk is weak at best....