Ian Crisp <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>The modern audience knows many things that an original audience could
>not have done:
>
>It sems to me more than likely that an audience that has experienced
>Wagner's extreme chromaticism, atonalism, Schoenberg's twelve-tone system,
>serialism, aleatoric music, minimalism, the current return to tonality,
>not to mention jazz, rock, all sorts of "world" music etc., cannot possibly
>listen to music written in the 18th century and experience it as it was
>experienced by its original audience.

There might be some wisdom in this.  I recall when I attended the first
performance of Beethovens 1 in 1800 people were shocked over the dissonant
accordes in the beginning...  I actually doubt that would ever happen to a
modern audience.

>The times are different, we are different, Bach is dead and cannot
>rewrite his music for the benefit of an audience that he could not have
>begun to understand.  We do him more honour by finding ways to help his
>music survive into the future than by fossilising him with our (quite
>possibly incorrect) ideas about how he wanted his music played for people
>who are as long dead as he is.

I must take standpoint for Jocelyn Wangs side, and vouch for the repeats.
"Finding ways to help hios music survive into the future" - that I take as
we shall only play Vivaldi like Puccini again.  But I say: Shall we put
up crayfishlights in neon colors on the pyramids to make them look like
New York just to make them survive in the metropolisjungle? Notepapers are
not more music that architectonial drawings are houses, and this causes
the problem, but still the value of an historic artwork lies just in that
is can remain a withnesses of its time.  So let us take engineering as
example: The Efesus temple of the Hanging Gardens or which wonder you want
can be said to have been works of great artistic value.  If you were about
to recontruct the Hanging Gardens, would you put up electric light in it?
Street lamps? Cola machines?

Mats Norrman
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