Steve Schwartz wrote:

>It cheers me up to see that Mahler can still cause controversy.
>However, I'm having trouble following the discussion.  What do folks
>mean by "perfect" and "messy" as applied to the symphonies?  I can think
>of weak passages in something like the finale to the First (as far as
>I'm concerned, a wonderful symphony anyway), but who's written a perfect
>symphony, and which one?  And is a perfect symphony the same thing as a
>good symphony?

Hmmm.  "perfect" applied to music or visual art, or literature probably
has no meaning at all, but let us try.  A perfect crystal is a lattice
of atoms, regularly spaced in all directions.  Pretty dull.  A perfect
tone is, by analogy, is a pure tone.  People do not rush out to buy cds
of d minor - and for good reason.  (" The Bernstein d minor is the one
to own." Not likely.) Conclusion: the perfect symphony is a dull,
meaningless, infinitely repetitive work.  That was easy!!Too much order
is perfect, but dull!!!  Too little order (an orchestra tuning up?) is
without meaning.

But order is entropy- and we have a stretch of acceptable values of
entropy ranging from the classical low entropy side (Haydn, Mozart) to
the high entropy Mahler.

And this is a perfectly foolish theory.

Bernard Chasan