David Harmon asks:

>SO, how much listening should one put into a piece of music to discover
>for oneself if it has the 'tease and drama' that your quote says a good
>composer has?

A difficult question.  I find that, and I speak only for myself, some
composers have a sound, a harmonic vocabulary or something that leaves
me clammy right from right from the get-go.  Britten for one, D'Indy
another from across the Channel.  Some works just have something about
them individually that say nothing to me.  For example, I enjoy Koechlin's
'Jungle book' a great deal, listening to it often.  On the other hand,
I pull out his 'Seven Stars Symphony' once a year just to be sure it is
really as bad as I remember it.

There is no one answer to David's question.  It depends solely on what
you you expect from music.  If you are happy listening to a set number
of works that have established themselves as your favorites then that
is well and good.  For me however that implies that all your great musical
discoveries have been made and that you feel there is no music out there
that is worth your while.  It is like saying "Why go to concerts?  All
the great performances have already been given by Furtwangler or Klemperer,
or Gerhard Pflug, or Kreisler, or Gieseking." Or like saying, "Why buy
a recording of a new piece of music?  All the great masterpieces have
already been written."

How sad a state that would be.  Have all the great novels been written?
Not if you believe the New York Times Book Review.  Have all the great
paintings been painted?  Not if you stroll through an artsy-fartsy area
of any moderate-sized city and peer into the galleries.  To think that
musical composition/performance/discovery has no more to offer us relegates
it to the most trivial of the arts.  I doubt anyone reading these
incoherent ramblings of mine would subscribe to that belief.

Respectfully submitted,

Ray Osnato