Ian Crisp <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>The modern audience knows many things that an original audience could
>not have done:
>
>It sems to me more than likely that an audience that has experienced
>Wagner's extreme chromaticism, atonalism, Schoenberg's twelve-tone system,
>serialism, aleatoric music, minimalism, the current return to tonality,
>not to mention jazz, rock, all sorts of "world" music etc., cannot possibly
>listen to music written in the 18th century and experience it as it was
>experienced by its original audience.

All true, but it is also true that we still respond to the music.
Conclusion:  we have not changed so much that the music no longer speaks
to us, just as Shakespeare still speaks to us.

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University