I wrote:

>> great music is music that convincingly sums up an epoch's feelings and
>>convictions, psychological truths and emotional values.  Mozart's music did
>>this in a breathtaking way.  But it can't do this for the totally different
>>times we live in.  It would be like a strange UFO from another galaxy,
>>alien and weird.  (And I still love the guy!)

Joceyln Wang responded:

>I'll disagree with you forever on this one.  What truth related to his era
>did Mozart sum up in, for example, the Jupiter Symphony?

No truth that we could write on a sheet of paper.  The truth transported
by the Jupiter Symphony is a testimony of Mozart's own psychological and
emotional state but it is at the same time a response to the time and epoch
he lived in - everything we do is a reaction to the time we live in, to
the way of thinking in this time, the way of feeling, of behaving and so
on.  We can't help that - and why should we? We all live under restricted
conditions and the artists do so, too.  Mozart lived in the world of the
18th century and all his works are an answer to this world, they bear
witness for this epoch.  They are like a window into time: we see how
a man of the past could feel, could see the world, sometimes - as in the
Jupiter - with an amazing unbroken feeling of self-assurance not possible
anymore for a modern composer like Mahler for instance.  This is what I
call the psychological truth of the Jupiter Symphony.  There is something
universally valid about it - and at the same time this piece is definitely
bound to the time when it was written.  (And to know this adds my pleasure
I have from it.)

>The truths that great music expresses are universal ones that have little
>or nothing to do with when a piece was written.  I don't think, "Ah, how
>utterly relevant to its epoch, the early 1800s" when I listen to Beethoven,
>and I doubt if any or many listeners do.

I do and I am at least one listener.  I don't read a Henry James novel
without thinking of the historical gap between him and me - it would
be intellectual nonsense to do so since you are are missing on a very
important layer of meaning.  I think to listen to Bach without giving
credit to the fact that we listen to a musical testimony of the past is
a strange thing to do.

>>Go on with your critics-bashing if you like it. But you cannot escape
>>the fact that you yourself become a critic by saying things like this.
>
>As does anyone in such a discussion.  But I am under no illusion that,
>in doing so, I am making anywhere near as much a contribution to music
>as those who compose it.

That's not what critics are there for.  Composers compose, critics
criticize and I do not know of one critic who thinks he is as important
as Mozart, Poulenc or Adams.  You are fighting with windmills.

Robert