Robert Peters

>...  What is your next proposal after sending the atonal music-lovers
>into smaller concert halls or out to their CD players? Forbidding Adorno?
>Banning this music? I think your statement is anti-CM because to me
>Classical Music is about tolerance, you know.

   "Music exists in the avant-garde, or not at all."
   - Boulez

   "Its value lies in a corrosive unacceptability to the middle class"
   - Adorno on Schoenberg's music

   "I write music for adults"
   - Schoenberg

If you want peace, stop shooting.

While tonalism - briefly put the idea that western tonality is good because
it is "natural" and other musics are "unnatural" - needs to be laid to
rest, so too does the long standing tirade from the avant-garde that its
music is of our time and everyone else is just piddling in a one-thousand
year old puddle.  Neither particularly describes the state of affairs, and
both are clearly created as clubs to whack non-believers with.

My acid test for whether a side in a partisan fight being sincere about
peace is whether they are willing to reign in their own intellectual
brown shirts.  So far both tonalism and avant-gardism are failing rather
miserably at this acid test.  After all, every position will attract a
certain number of extreme cases.  This is true of both the left and the
right in politics, and in almost every other debate in history.  Sides
in a partisan fight must run the balance between keeping their extremists
happy - since extremists give more generously of time, money - and when the
occasion arises blood - and producing results that are towards the general
good.  When a movment becomes devoted to its extremists, or in worst case
sets about manufacturing them, then it can be truly said that such a
movement is not mature enough to govern.  Whether a nation or institutions
of learning and art.

A movement must show that it is capable of reproving its own, that thereby
demonstrating that it is the principle that is important, and not merely
the excuse to engage in anti-social behavior.  Ardent support is laudable,
even extremism can be laudable.  But the movement as a whole must show that
it is capable of channelling that support productively.

stirling s newberry
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