Satoshi Akima:

>I will be looking forward to hearing some Ustvolskaya.  I anticipate that
>I too will have some difficulty appreciating her, but unlike the overly
>sensitive dear souls on this list who faint at the hint of any dissonance,
>I will be relishing the prospect of repeated careful listening until her
>musical vision becomes clear to me.  I can imagine liking her more than I
>do Sophia Gubaidulina, whose music, deeply influenced as it is by the likes
>of Nono and Stockhausen, I still find simply too saccharine!  She is like
>an atonal Lloyd-Webber.

If you can discern any similarity between Gubadalina and lloyd-Webber then
you indeed have awesome ears.  But of course it is not the ears- it is a
bizarre modern music masochism at work - the uglier the better!!!  So Dr.
Akima already is prepared to prefer Ustvolskya to Gubaidulina without
hearing a note of her work, but on her reputation of ugly!!  Remarkable!!
And somewhere out there, there is a young composer who no doubt will make
U sound simple and pretty and saccharine by comparision.  And to thing we
took Bartok seriously, that simple folk musician!!!  How shallow and
sentimental of us!!!

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University