Iskender Savasir wrote:

>A note on the canon from a lurker from distat Istanbul...  I have a one
>hour program in a radio channell, own and oerated by an intellectuals'
>cooperative.  On one of my earlier programs, I was foolish enough to play
>the Grosse Fugue as the kind of music that should not have been composed -
>ever sicne then at least once every two month I am forced to try to explain
>myself to a slew of angry fellow programmers and listeners, but I must say
>I was pleased by the response of some of the listeners, who, they said,
>were relieved by what I said from what they felt to be a duty to enjoy
>everything that Beethoven wrote.

Such are the hazards of Canons that cause people to go ballistic....

I tend to go with those who say that one's own canon, like one's own
religion, is something that has to be internally processed.  I certainly
recognize many of the classical music works that are often proclaimed as
being part of some Common Practice, but whether I actually listen to them
at any frequency anymore is another matter.  As someone who has kept and
gradually expanded my awareness of the Early Music scene for nearly 30
years, my own concept of this term in a day-to-day real sense may be quite
different from others'....

In any case, this seems like a lot of running around a topic which has no
real standard definition of what the term 'canon' is....after all, people
can and will RECEIVE anything in terms of what may or may not be the "good"
stuff as defined by some fuzzy entity.  Whether they ACCEPT it as part of
their "canon" is entirely another matter.

Pachelbel, anyone?
Bill H.