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Subject:
From:
Ian Crisp <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 6 Mar 2000 21:30:05 +0000
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Jocelyn Wang:

>>The only simple and convenient thing here is to shrug off all
>>responsibility for understanding and decision-making by palming it off
>>onto the crumbling shoulders of the long-decomposed composer who lived
>>his life in a different world.  Try to understand him by all means, but
>>don't give the dead power to make choices for the living.  Like it our
>>not, that's ours (for a while) to do the best we can with, then to pass
>>on to others.
>
>Wow.  The composer's dead, therefore living performers have carte blanche
>to mess up their works any way they darned well please.  Oh, yeah, that's
>some reverence for art.

Where did I mention or even hint at "carte blanche" etc.? That comes
from you, not from me.  Of course performers have a responsibility to
the composer, be he dead or alive, that will constrain their freedom.
I thought that was sufficiently blindingly obvious that it did not need
to be spelled out.  They also have a responsibility to their audience.
This whole carte-blanche, anything-goes, free-for-all business has been
dreamt up by others, and I should be profoundly grateful to anyone who
can show anything in what I have written that justifies raising it.

Ian Crisp
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