Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>...I really don't find any composer since 1750 the qualitative equal of
>Bach, Byrd, or Josquin.  Of course, that's just me....

Why not accept that? But is it just me that prefers an evening's concert
consisting of a mix of these names with those of the romantic period that
follows? Actually the interspersion of, say, a composition by Webern is
good for a change of pace, especially because he kindly limits most of his
stuff to about ten minutes' duration.  A good sense of value had he.

Achim Breiling then writes:

>As Denis Fodor pointed out in his recent posting that muisc lovers
>generally find atonal and serial stuff unpleasant (you have statistically
>significant numbers for that, Denis?) Harris and Stravinskky must have
>been right and we should better forget about Mrs. Usvolskaya.

Ach, Achim, I suppose I've seen numbers now and then, but common sense
here'll get us further.  To help things along, I'll gladly concede that
Schoenberg, Boulez, Adorno and that crowd make, and plug, music that's
statistically beautifully.  Or, as a nuclear physicist might put it,
negatively ugly.  But to make a natural science out of classical music
is about as fruitless a task as doing ditto to speculative philosophy.
Satoshi Akima will know that Edmund Husserl tried that with his turn in
phenomenology and all he spawned was a Martin Heidegger who ended up back
in metaphysics (when not cozying up to the Fuehrer).

Which brings me to my point.  Let's all go back to Josquin, Beethoven and
<gulp> John Williams and everything will once again be in clover.  For a
change of pace we can thrown in a short Gesualdo, or four and a half
minutes, more or less, of Cage.

Denis Fodor