Mats Norrman replies to Margaret Mikulska:

>>I'm very enthusiastic about 20th-C music; that's why when I see composers
>>like Kernis or Corigliano winning awards for their tepid, easy neo-tonal
>>pabulum, I'm quite appalled.  Thanks goodness Carter, Boulez, and others
>>do get some recognition as well.
>
>Why don't you go to the faculty of mathematics at your university? There
>you find lots of potential music by Boulez (though these one is in the
>faculty where it should be).

I quote from a contemporary Boston newspaper:

  The First Symphony of Brahms seemd to us as hard and as uninspired
  as upon its former hearing.  It is mathematical music evolved with
  difficulty from an unimaginative brain. . . . This noisy, ungraceful,
  confusing and unattractive example of dry pedantry before the
  masterpieces of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Gade, or even of the
  reckless and over-fluent Raff!  Absurd! . . . All that we have heard
  and seen from Brahms's pen abounds in headwork without a glimmer of
  soul. . . . It is possible that as we grow more familiar with this
  symphony it may become clearer to us, but we might pore over a difficult
  problem in mathematics until the same result is reached without arriving
  at the conclusion that it is a poetic inspiration.

As someone who has studied both music and mathematics, I don't really
understand why difficult music is labeled mathematical, unless most people
find mathematics as difficult as the music.

Steve Schwartz