When I was teaching at a Chinese university, I used to like to tease my students--citizens of an officially atheistic country--that they wouldn't be sitting in a university classroom if it were not for the Catholic Church. Then I would explain that the first universities were founded during the Middle Ages in Europe by the Catholic Church. I would also point out that the first hospitals were established by the Catholic Church, which would explain why a conventional symbol for a hospital, even in China, is a cross. However, I myself only recently discovered that the first music conservatories were also created by the Catholic Church. According to Ted Libby in The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music (yes, I used to listen to NPR in my younger years, before I became tired of their predictable ideological bias!)--which I have been browsing through recently-the word conservatory comes from the Italian conservatorio, which "refers to Italian orphanages of the 17th and 18th centuries at which music was taught. Nearly all were run by the Catholic Church and had been founded as hospitals--their purpose in teaching music was to give poor and orphaned children a trade by which they might support themselves." (p. 146). I had been aware of the fact that the great Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi had taught at a girls' orphanage in Venice, and that he had written some of his music for the school's orchestra, which was celebrated in its time for the skill of its musicians. However, I hadn't realized before that all conservatories had originally been Catholic orphanages.
In short, without the Catholic Church--and, arguably, by extension, Christianity itself--there would be no Paris Conservatoire, Royal Academy of Music, Juilliard School, or any of the other great conservatories. And possibly, without these conservatories, the world would have been deprived of some of its greatest musicians. Consequently, it can be said that without Christianity, this great art form--classical music--would have been greatly impoverished.
Image of the Royal Academy of Music in London from Wikimedia Commons