Bernard Chasan <[log in to unmask]> charges Dernuis Fodor with...

>a literally authoritarian view of music.  We are back in the wonderful
>world of inner circles and canons.  That music is wrought by social
>animals is hardly in dispute, but that fact need hardly lead to the
>lockstep implied by Denis' note...

Oh, I think that's putting too drastic a spin to it, Bernard.  A musician,
much like a physicist, is not shaped by his own taste; he is shaped by a
composite of tastes that tutored him/her.  A dab of free will, or call it
genius, can be involved, of course, but very largely only in how deftly the
palette of tastes is selected.  Thus great leaps in progress, again both in
music as well as in physics, are little else but highly educated and daring
guesses.  These authoritative guesses then are tested by peers.  In science
the parlance obtains that they're tested for falsifiability, in music it's
the taste test.  In both cases it's the authorities in the field that do
the testing.  Authoritarian politics relates to the matter here under
discussion only as a red herring.

Denis Fodor