Robert Peters responded to Joceyln Wang responding to him:

>>>great music is music that convincingly sums up an epoch's feelings and
>>>convictions, psychological truths and emotional values.
>
>>I'll disagree with you forever on this one.  What truth related to his era
>>did Mozart sum up in, for example, the Jupiter Symphony?
>
>No truth that we could write on a sheet of paper.

We agree that music is something that cannot be expressed with words,
but that is the extent of it.

>They are like a window into time:  we see how a man of the past could
>feel, could see the world, sometimes - as in the Jupiter - with an amazing
>unbroken feeling of self-assurance not possible anymore for a modern
>composer like Mahler for instance.  This is what I call the psychological
>truth of the Jupiter Symphony.  There is something universally valid about
>it - and at the same time this piece is efinitely bound to the time when it
>was written.

First, Mahler died 90ish years ago, so he can hardly be called "modern"
any more than those of his time would have used that adjective to describe
Beethoven.

Second, the fact that Mozart's music has universal validity frees it from
any historical constraints.

>I don't read a Henry James novel without thinking of the historical gap
>between him and me - it would be intellectual nonsense to do so since you
>are are missing on a very important layer of meaning.  I think to listen
>to Bach without giving credit to the fact that we listen to a musical
>testimony of the past is a strange thing to do.

Really? When I listen to the music, I think of the music, not when it was
written.  Yes, Bach's (and Mozart's, and Beethoven's) music IS the way it
is in part because of when it was written, but its greatness transcends
when it was written, so it would be just as great if it had been written
last week, which is where we disagree.

>I do not know of one critic who thinks he is as important as Mozart,
>Poulenc or Adams.  You are fighting with windmills.

Not windmills, windbags.

Jocelyn Wang
Culver Chamber Music Series