Robert Clements:

>I was going to leave this thread alone; but Jon misses the obvious point:
>it isn't that so few people can follow dreary Drury's fossilised masters;
>but that they have absolutely no interest in doing so (& indeed: noone has
>yet offered a single good reason why they should).

Let's make a second obvious point: no one can offer a reason why anyone
should listen to anything.  Why should I listen to Beethoven or Brahms or
(fill in your favorite composer here)?  The only reason I can see is that I
get some sort of pleasure doing so.  It's the same reason why I would listen
to the composers Drury likes or watch one tv program rather than another or
prefer one author to another.  Which is better: green or blue?

You'd think this point self-evident, but apparently it's not.  We continue
to congratulate ourselves on our own taste and denigrate others whose taste
differs from ours.

I don't particularly care what other people listen to as long as they extend
to me the same tolerance and opportunity.  I'm not a missionary interested
in saving people's aesthetic souls.  By the same token, writing off an
entire catalogue, mostly unheard, hurts nobody but the person who writes it
off, in that he denies himself the possibility of pleasure.  It's when
someone tells me I'm a fraud or a fool because of what I listen to or seeks
to deny me the opportunity to listen that I kick up a fuss.

Steve Schwartz