Gregory Sigman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Perhaps this would be an opportune time to re-read Babbitt's "Who Cares
>if You Listen?" I believe it's germane to the art versus entertainment
>debate.

I keep a copy of it in my "interesting articles" file.  In there I have
such things as Bernstein's NY Times article, on the death of the symphony.
He called them museums...and indeed, he seemed to work at making them
as such during the later years of his life.

In keeping with the discussion, I encountered the following quote
yesterday.  "An artist does not work for years putting his whole heart,
soul, and being into his work, merely to furnish people with an
aesthetico-intellectual anodyne, -to give them music which they can
passively enjoy without the exertion of thinking." John Fiske writing
in the Atlantic Monthly 31 (1873) as quoted in Nicholas E. Tawa's "The
Coming of Age of American Art Music," a book I can heartily recommend.

Karl

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