Steve Schwa wrote:

>>Nevetheless don't forget most people want to relax to enjoy listening,
>>period.  After a long day's hard work they are not looking to preserve
>>the art or to do more work getting out their encyclopedias to read and
>>study.
>
>God forbid someone should actually learn something.

I agree there, He/She should certainly not forbid learning something or
anything.  However 'all work and no play' might make for the end of CM.
Learning was work for me as a youngster and is even harder or nearly
impossible for this old dog and new CM.

>...  Music becomes less necessary to
>culture and more a mark of self-congratulation or consumer status.

This is true.  However when was the last time you looked in the back
of one of those programs handed out in a major hall?  Did you happen to
notice both the corporate and private donors wth out which you would be
accelerating the loss of CM of any type as the doors would become shut
tight.

>The Music as Entertainment vs. Music as Necessary is a battle that's
>raged since before the Middle Ages.  You can find one or the other
>viewpoint expressed in Boethius and in St. Augustine.  For me, it's not
>a question of one or the other.  I want to be entertained, engaged, and
>interested, but I also find that the more music I seek out, that my ideas
>about the art and about art in general change.  I begin to reflect on
>points of view other than my own, and inevitably my view alters.

AFAIAC Beethoven vs.  Mozart vs.  Haydn constitute different points of
view.  Throwing in Harbison, Wernick, and/or Schuller doesn't enable me
to reflect on a different point of view in any way.  It merely gives me
a tremendous headache.

>It amazes me that we should limit ourselves so much in what we listen
>to.  We certainly don't restrict our reading to that extent.  A person
>who reads only mysteries or only 19th-century novels or Greek tragedies
>most of us would recognize as a bit limited, with certain disadvantages.
>A library holding only the works of Shakespeare, like the Folger, has
>depth but no breadth as a repository of knowledge.  As good as Shakespeare
>is, he's not the only mind worth knowing.

In order to relate to a piece of art one has to recognize some reflection
of their personal experience and emotions.  In the other extreme I can
understand an individual enjoying a sequence of random sounds merely
because it fulfills the anticipation of sound sequences they are familiar
with because they were "learned".  Unfortunately nothing in the process
of any value had been learned.

Norman Schwartz

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